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The Bell
‘In this holy community she would play the witch.’
Imber Court is a quiet haven for lost souls, a utopia for those who can neither live in the world, nor out of it. But beneath the gentle daily routines of this community run currents of supressed desire, religious yearning and a legend of disastrous love. Charming, indolent Dora arrives in their midst, and half-unwittingly conjures these submerged things to the surface.
Imber Court is a quiet haven for lost souls, a utopia for those who can neither live in the world, nor out of it. But beneath the gentle daily routines of this community run currents of supressed desire, religious yearning and a legend of disastrous love. Charming, indolent Dora arrives in their midst, and half-unwittingly conjures these submerged things to the surface.
322 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1958
About the author
Iris Murdoch
106 books2,331 followersDame Jean Iris Murdoch
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...
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September 4, 2020
Interrupting Routine
I work as tutor and librarian at Blackfriars Hall Oxford, the smallest and most medieval of the University of Oxford colleges and also a Dominican priory. A few years ago Blackfriars acquired a bell to call the friars to prayer. The sound of the bell does indeed create a definite atmosphere in the place; as also does its timing since it rings, like its larger fellow at Christ Church College, according to solar time - about six minutes behind GMT. The midday call to the Angelus therefore is somewhat disconcerting for passers by who nervously check their watches. I have come to believe that this slight disruption, this interruption, is precisely the bell’s function, intended or not. Paradoxically: a routine that interrupts routine. One way to interpret Murdoch’s novel is as just such an interruption in the lives of its characters.
A.S. Byatt in her introduction calls The Bell Murdoch’s first ‘English’ novel. And it certainly creates a distinctive atmosphere, one so dense, thick, and humid in the Summer heat that it feels like green cotton wool - simultaneously inhibiting and cushioning movement. The characters, mostly middle class professionals, each might have ‘issues’; but all are nevertheless cradled in the social solidity of a 1950’s bourgeois English culture that hopes against hope that it will remain 1939 forever. They live in an existential routine that seems fixed; they are stuck... largely with themselves.
People ‘get on’ as if on a trajectory with the defined and relatively narrow limits of Oxbridge graduates in a post-war world they find alien and confusing. Their individual worries, however, don’t inhibit their confidence, material or spiritual, in being English. They are, of course, completely unaware of this. How could it be otherwise? But their Englishness is the necessarily unstated subject of the book. The narrator would only spoil the narrative if she gave the game away; introspection is not to be encouraged, “A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds.” Irony is after all English group therapy.
Opening with a very civilised adultery, leading to an even more civilised reconciliation for which the outgoing lover provides transportation to the railway station, there is no conflict which can’t be solved if one just has the patience to wait it out. And for heavens sake keep one’s mouth shut. Intimate communication is far too perilous a venture. Much preferable to rely on one’s friends to buoy one up without making a fuss, usually with a little G&T, or possibly even a bit of evening Compline before bed.
The High Church tradition, the antithesis of her Irish Presbyterian background, is something Murdoch became intimately familiar with in Oxford. Her College, Somerville, is just past the end of St. Giles’, a street along which John Henry Newman started his career as an Anglican vicar at one end and wound up a Catholic Cardinal at the other. Halfway along, and touching Blackfriars, is Pusey House, named for Newman’s colleague in the liturgical revival of Anglicanism (the Oxford Movement in fact). Pusey House is often more Catholic than the local Catholic churches since it can both anticipate the introduction of new ritual or revert to ancient practices without consulting the Vatican (Pusey House also has the best collection of Vatican documents in Oxford).
Some consider High Anglicanism to be a mimicry of Catholicism. It’s not. It is true English Catholicism, or better said, Catholicism in the English mode. Many Oxford colleges conduct Evensong and Compline services daily during term, using English Plainsong or Gregorian chant according to preference. These are sensually pleasing, one might call them erotic, events. They employ all the smells and bells of Catholic ritual but also emit a vaguely camp rebelliousness - directed at both Low Church Anglicans as well as the straight-laced (historically Irish) Catholic masses.
This Anglo-Catholicism provides a great deal of the dark green, cotton wool, comfort of The Bell. The enclosed convent of Anglican nuns in Imber is not an antithesis to the repressed erotic desires of the characters who fetch up together across the lake in a half-derelict country pile of Imber Court; it is a spiritual celebration of the erotic (One is reminded of Teresa of Avila and her swooning for Christ, her Spouse). I know of at least three similar communities within 15 minutes drive of Oxford. And I lived in one of these while I wrote my doctoral dissertation.*
This kind of community is not a place to escape desire but a place in which desire can be explored in a way that is uniquely English: through patient ritual, agricultural and industrial as well as religious. As the medieval philosophers taught: through practice one can act one’s way into a moral life. “The great thing about a dog” says one of the residents “is that it can be trained to love you.” And not just dogs. Humans too can be taught to love trough practice; but not through conversation, idle or therapeutic. So, “Meals were taken in silence at Imber.”
In a sense, therefore, sex is as much a religious practice in Anglo-Catholicism as it is in the Buddhism of the Kama Sutra. It needn’t be advertised as such, that would require talk which would compromise the effort fatally. But Murdoch makes the equivalence explicit in her description of the psychic state of her main character, a homosexual: “...in some curious way the emotion which fed both [his religious feeling and homosexual orientation] arose deeply from the same source.”
English resourcefulness is to be found in this dance of sex and religion, which is carried out as much to the rhythm of an English country house as of a Benedictine convent. The mustiness of each is additive: “There was a stale smell, like the smell of old bread, the smell of an institution.” A concise summary really of the English Baroque. Everything is surface, but brightly lighted surface so that nothing is actually hidden, “All the electric lights were so bright at Imber.”
The inhabitants are essentially misfits, and are recruited as such, “people... who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely...” Each of these defective characters has a place, a duty really, in the overall choreography of an operatic ballet in Imber Court, a definite role that fits snugly into an overall ensemble.
Dora is the dim beauty, the soprano of the piece. She has no comprehension of religion and only the most instrumentally sterile view of sex; but she is not malicious, “That she had no memory made her generous.” She is a central figure, a sort of goddess of creation (and of course therefore sex), who tends to get lost in Murdoch’s narrative turbulence. Paul, Dora’s husband, is the operatic baritone, for whom neither sex nor religion is about passion but domesticity. He desires Dora as housekeeper and mother for his children; and religion is part of an ordered family bliss. His lust, such as it is, is paterfamilial and conventional not perverse.
The director/producer is Mrs. Mark (married to Mr. Mrs. Mark), a somewhat beefy person in long skirts, with “well-developed calves.” She is a type of English proto-hippie perhaps, an evangelical Mrs Danvers, living a life of gentile, procedural poverty on someone else’s dime, never without a ‘cause’. Without her, neither sex nor religion could flourish at Imber. She is the liturgical and social hub, the enforcer of strict adherence to the rubrics, “It’s not like a hotel and we do expect our guests to fit in – and I think that’s what they like best too,” she politely commands. She also ensures that conversation never becomes intrusive, “That’s another little religious rule that we try to follow. No gossip.” What takes place outside Imber, remains outside Imber.
Mrs. Mark is the agent of Michael Meade, the somewhat reluctant leader, whose family estate Imber Court is. In subsequent decades Michael would have been identified as the ‘cult leader’ of the residents, not as sinister as Jim Jones or as commercial as Werner Erhard perhaps but still of some unaccountably charismatic incompetence. Michael has been inspired by the Abbess of the Benedictine convent to ‘minister’ to folk who are neither clerical nor secular but what now might be called ‘seekers’. He is a homosexual.
Catherine is the mezzo-soprano and, innovatively, the prima ballerina of the piece who is immediately identified by Dora as a rival. Catherine is imminently to become a postulant in the convent; or, as her twin brother perceives the situation, to be swallowed alive by the institutional monster of religious passion. Toby, Catherine’s male sexual counterpart, is the the pious, virginal counter-tenor. He is the unsure novice, spiritually as well as sexually unformed.
The eponymous bell constitutes what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin - a motivating force whose function is to set the narrative in motion but that remains invisible. Essential therefore, although apparently trivial. It is Dora and Toby, at ends of the sexual/spiritual spectrum, who release the bell from the primal waters in which it has been hidden. Driven by the ‘event’ of the bell, the characters carom around the confines of Imber Court, impelling each other to acts of spiritual lust and material folly in a marvellously English way. And of course interrupting their lives profoundly, not just for them but for all of Murdoch’s generation.
* In fact this form of Anglo-Catholic lay community was inspired by the so-called Distributist Movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. This was a Catholic attempt, promoted by the likes of GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, to find a ‘middle way’ between Capitalism and Communism. It’s ideal was a sort of medieval economy dominated by small agricultural producers who owned and worked their own land. A few of Distributism’s ideological remnants still exist in Britain, Canada and Australia.
I work as tutor and librarian at Blackfriars Hall Oxford, the smallest and most medieval of the University of Oxford colleges and also a Dominican priory. A few years ago Blackfriars acquired a bell to call the friars to prayer. The sound of the bell does indeed create a definite atmosphere in the place; as also does its timing since it rings, like its larger fellow at Christ Church College, according to solar time - about six minutes behind GMT. The midday call to the Angelus therefore is somewhat disconcerting for passers by who nervously check their watches. I have come to believe that this slight disruption, this interruption, is precisely the bell’s function, intended or not. Paradoxically: a routine that interrupts routine. One way to interpret Murdoch’s novel is as just such an interruption in the lives of its characters.
A.S. Byatt in her introduction calls The Bell Murdoch’s first ‘English’ novel. And it certainly creates a distinctive atmosphere, one so dense, thick, and humid in the Summer heat that it feels like green cotton wool - simultaneously inhibiting and cushioning movement. The characters, mostly middle class professionals, each might have ‘issues’; but all are nevertheless cradled in the social solidity of a 1950’s bourgeois English culture that hopes against hope that it will remain 1939 forever. They live in an existential routine that seems fixed; they are stuck... largely with themselves.
People ‘get on’ as if on a trajectory with the defined and relatively narrow limits of Oxbridge graduates in a post-war world they find alien and confusing. Their individual worries, however, don’t inhibit their confidence, material or spiritual, in being English. They are, of course, completely unaware of this. How could it be otherwise? But their Englishness is the necessarily unstated subject of the book. The narrator would only spoil the narrative if she gave the game away; introspection is not to be encouraged, “A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds.” Irony is after all English group therapy.
Opening with a very civilised adultery, leading to an even more civilised reconciliation for which the outgoing lover provides transportation to the railway station, there is no conflict which can’t be solved if one just has the patience to wait it out. And for heavens sake keep one’s mouth shut. Intimate communication is far too perilous a venture. Much preferable to rely on one’s friends to buoy one up without making a fuss, usually with a little G&T, or possibly even a bit of evening Compline before bed.
The High Church tradition, the antithesis of her Irish Presbyterian background, is something Murdoch became intimately familiar with in Oxford. Her College, Somerville, is just past the end of St. Giles’, a street along which John Henry Newman started his career as an Anglican vicar at one end and wound up a Catholic Cardinal at the other. Halfway along, and touching Blackfriars, is Pusey House, named for Newman’s colleague in the liturgical revival of Anglicanism (the Oxford Movement in fact). Pusey House is often more Catholic than the local Catholic churches since it can both anticipate the introduction of new ritual or revert to ancient practices without consulting the Vatican (Pusey House also has the best collection of Vatican documents in Oxford).
Some consider High Anglicanism to be a mimicry of Catholicism. It’s not. It is true English Catholicism, or better said, Catholicism in the English mode. Many Oxford colleges conduct Evensong and Compline services daily during term, using English Plainsong or Gregorian chant according to preference. These are sensually pleasing, one might call them erotic, events. They employ all the smells and bells of Catholic ritual but also emit a vaguely camp rebelliousness - directed at both Low Church Anglicans as well as the straight-laced (historically Irish) Catholic masses.
This Anglo-Catholicism provides a great deal of the dark green, cotton wool, comfort of The Bell. The enclosed convent of Anglican nuns in Imber is not an antithesis to the repressed erotic desires of the characters who fetch up together across the lake in a half-derelict country pile of Imber Court; it is a spiritual celebration of the erotic (One is reminded of Teresa of Avila and her swooning for Christ, her Spouse). I know of at least three similar communities within 15 minutes drive of Oxford. And I lived in one of these while I wrote my doctoral dissertation.*
This kind of community is not a place to escape desire but a place in which desire can be explored in a way that is uniquely English: through patient ritual, agricultural and industrial as well as religious. As the medieval philosophers taught: through practice one can act one’s way into a moral life. “The great thing about a dog” says one of the residents “is that it can be trained to love you.” And not just dogs. Humans too can be taught to love trough practice; but not through conversation, idle or therapeutic. So, “Meals were taken in silence at Imber.”
In a sense, therefore, sex is as much a religious practice in Anglo-Catholicism as it is in the Buddhism of the Kama Sutra. It needn’t be advertised as such, that would require talk which would compromise the effort fatally. But Murdoch makes the equivalence explicit in her description of the psychic state of her main character, a homosexual: “...in some curious way the emotion which fed both [his religious feeling and homosexual orientation] arose deeply from the same source.”
English resourcefulness is to be found in this dance of sex and religion, which is carried out as much to the rhythm of an English country house as of a Benedictine convent. The mustiness of each is additive: “There was a stale smell, like the smell of old bread, the smell of an institution.” A concise summary really of the English Baroque. Everything is surface, but brightly lighted surface so that nothing is actually hidden, “All the electric lights were so bright at Imber.”
The inhabitants are essentially misfits, and are recruited as such, “people... who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely...” Each of these defective characters has a place, a duty really, in the overall choreography of an operatic ballet in Imber Court, a definite role that fits snugly into an overall ensemble.
Dora is the dim beauty, the soprano of the piece. She has no comprehension of religion and only the most instrumentally sterile view of sex; but she is not malicious, “That she had no memory made her generous.” She is a central figure, a sort of goddess of creation (and of course therefore sex), who tends to get lost in Murdoch’s narrative turbulence. Paul, Dora’s husband, is the operatic baritone, for whom neither sex nor religion is about passion but domesticity. He desires Dora as housekeeper and mother for his children; and religion is part of an ordered family bliss. His lust, such as it is, is paterfamilial and conventional not perverse.
The director/producer is Mrs. Mark (married to Mr. Mrs. Mark), a somewhat beefy person in long skirts, with “well-developed calves.” She is a type of English proto-hippie perhaps, an evangelical Mrs Danvers, living a life of gentile, procedural poverty on someone else’s dime, never without a ‘cause’. Without her, neither sex nor religion could flourish at Imber. She is the liturgical and social hub, the enforcer of strict adherence to the rubrics, “It’s not like a hotel and we do expect our guests to fit in – and I think that’s what they like best too,” she politely commands. She also ensures that conversation never becomes intrusive, “That’s another little religious rule that we try to follow. No gossip.” What takes place outside Imber, remains outside Imber.
Mrs. Mark is the agent of Michael Meade, the somewhat reluctant leader, whose family estate Imber Court is. In subsequent decades Michael would have been identified as the ‘cult leader’ of the residents, not as sinister as Jim Jones or as commercial as Werner Erhard perhaps but still of some unaccountably charismatic incompetence. Michael has been inspired by the Abbess of the Benedictine convent to ‘minister’ to folk who are neither clerical nor secular but what now might be called ‘seekers’. He is a homosexual.
Catherine is the mezzo-soprano and, innovatively, the prima ballerina of the piece who is immediately identified by Dora as a rival. Catherine is imminently to become a postulant in the convent; or, as her twin brother perceives the situation, to be swallowed alive by the institutional monster of religious passion. Toby, Catherine’s male sexual counterpart, is the the pious, virginal counter-tenor. He is the unsure novice, spiritually as well as sexually unformed.
The eponymous bell constitutes what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin - a motivating force whose function is to set the narrative in motion but that remains invisible. Essential therefore, although apparently trivial. It is Dora and Toby, at ends of the sexual/spiritual spectrum, who release the bell from the primal waters in which it has been hidden. Driven by the ‘event’ of the bell, the characters carom around the confines of Imber Court, impelling each other to acts of spiritual lust and material folly in a marvellously English way. And of course interrupting their lives profoundly, not just for them but for all of Murdoch’s generation.
* In fact this form of Anglo-Catholic lay community was inspired by the so-called Distributist Movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. This was a Catholic attempt, promoted by the likes of GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, to find a ‘middle way’ between Capitalism and Communism. It’s ideal was a sort of medieval economy dominated by small agricultural producers who owned and worked their own land. A few of Distributism’s ideological remnants still exist in Britain, Canada and Australia.
January 11, 2018
I love Iris Murdoch. I've come to expect certain things from her novels: one astonishing, humorous transition (here, it comes early, on a train); at least 2 abrupt sexually-centered plot twists that make me exclaim out loud on the subway; a few incredible lines that border on philosophy. Most of all, there's the sense in her novels that anything is possible - as the excellent A.S. Byatt interview puts it, she has the instincts of the 19th century novelist, though she's thoroughly contemporary. One caution: DON'T READ THE BACK JACKET or any info if you are interested in this book. The first surprise in the book is wonderful if, like me, you don't see it coming.
I didn't love THE BELL as much as THE SEA, THE SEA or A SEVERED HEAD, because it feels as if Murdoch is still shaking off some structural ghosts from more conventional fiction. This was her 4th novel, and the set-up is great, very reminiscent of "Black Narcissus." A lay-community has set up camp in a mansion and founded a spiritual community outside the gates of an old Abbey, which is waiting for a giant bell. In her eagerness to people the community, Murdoch's generosity with supporting characters occasionally left me a bit confused (lots of boring male names), and the complexity of the set-up and the slight wrapping-up, mid-century feeling of the ending slowed me down.
The three perspective characters - Dora, a flighty aspiring painter with a harsh husband; Michael, the leader of the community w/ a secret past; Toby, a teenager of boundless energy - carry this book, and Murdoch uses various bells, both metaphorical and actual, to great effect. There's a spectacular sequence with birds, and the nuns, sitting invisible on the grounds, add a unique tension to the action.
Once this gets going (I don't want to spoil anything because it's so good), once it turns Murdochian, I was thrilled. There is an incredible revelation from the headlights of a car - a device she reuses almost identically in THE SEA, THE SEA - and things proceed from there with a relentless sexual logic that I adored. And the writing!
"Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into the opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection."
"Memories of the previous evening returned to him vividly, and he had a curious sense of being unfaithful, followed by a feeling of the utter messiness of everything. Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself."
If you're interested in Murdoch, I'd start with A SEVERED HEAD so you can build trust in her capacity for insanity - I might have put this down after 40 pages if I didn't have faith in her, and I'm very glad that I didn't.
I didn't love THE BELL as much as THE SEA, THE SEA or A SEVERED HEAD, because it feels as if Murdoch is still shaking off some structural ghosts from more conventional fiction. This was her 4th novel, and the set-up is great, very reminiscent of "Black Narcissus." A lay-community has set up camp in a mansion and founded a spiritual community outside the gates of an old Abbey, which is waiting for a giant bell. In her eagerness to people the community, Murdoch's generosity with supporting characters occasionally left me a bit confused (lots of boring male names), and the complexity of the set-up and the slight wrapping-up, mid-century feeling of the ending slowed me down.
The three perspective characters - Dora, a flighty aspiring painter with a harsh husband; Michael, the leader of the community w/ a secret past; Toby, a teenager of boundless energy - carry this book, and Murdoch uses various bells, both metaphorical and actual, to great effect. There's a spectacular sequence with birds, and the nuns, sitting invisible on the grounds, add a unique tension to the action.
Once this gets going (I don't want to spoil anything because it's so good), once it turns Murdochian, I was thrilled. There is an incredible revelation from the headlights of a car - a device she reuses almost identically in THE SEA, THE SEA - and things proceed from there with a relentless sexual logic that I adored. And the writing!
"Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into the opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection."
"Memories of the previous evening returned to him vividly, and he had a curious sense of being unfaithful, followed by a feeling of the utter messiness of everything. Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself."
If you're interested in Murdoch, I'd start with A SEVERED HEAD so you can build trust in her capacity for insanity - I might have put this down after 40 pages if I didn't have faith in her, and I'm very glad that I didn't.
October 19, 2018
The main character is Dora, a ditz, but you gotta love her for her good heart. She captures a butterfly from the floor of the subway so it doesn’t get stepped on but then has no idea what do with it. She wears high heels for a walk in muddy woods and then loses her shoes. She forgets her bag at the railway station. She has to take a long bus ride into town to retrieve it, takes the bus back home, forgetting the bag again in a pub. She’s an aspiring artist who is lazy and shows no signs of talent.
Dora is married to a cold, cruel man who is an art historian. They have an on-again, off-again relationship. As the story opens she’s returning to her husband from a casual affair with an old flame. “…she could be happy neither with her husband nor without him.” “It seemed to her that her husband …was urging her to grow up, and yet had left her no space to grow up into.” Her husband, the snot, tells her: “Of course I don’t respect you…Have I any reason to? I’m in love with you, unfortunately, that’s all.” How’s that for a sad state of affairs?
Her husband is researching church records at a lay religious commune affiliated with an adjoining convent of cloistered nuns. The religious commune serves as a buffer (or an entryway depending on how you look at it) between the more religious world of the convent and the material world. It’s for people who can’t find a profession like teaching or nursing endowed with spiritual significance.
One of the other main characters is a gay man who initially saw no conflict between his Anglican religion and his sexuality – they seemed to come from the same source -- until he decided he wanted to become a priest. “He was conscious of such a fund of love and goodwill for the young creature [young man] beside him. It could not be that God intended such a spring of love to be quenched utterably.” The novel has a fairly frank discussion of male homosexuality given that it was published in 1958.
The main action in the book revolves around a new bell that is to be installed at the abbey. It is to replace one that has been missing for centuries and that supposedly sunk in the lake. Dora and a young man find the old bell and raise it as a “surprise” in a comedic farce. All that serves to move the book along but it’s really a story of good and evil, morality, and people struggling to do the good thing.
Two quotes I liked:
“Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.”
Here’s a variation on the theme of rising to your highest level of incompetence: “One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles.”
The blurbs call it a “funny and sad” novel and I think that is accurate. A good read although not the author’s strongest – I still prefer Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
My GR friend Bionic Jean has written a much more detailed and thoughtful review of the book here if you are interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Photo of Buckfast Abbey, Dartmoor from britainexpress.com
Photo of the author from biography.com
Dora is married to a cold, cruel man who is an art historian. They have an on-again, off-again relationship. As the story opens she’s returning to her husband from a casual affair with an old flame. “…she could be happy neither with her husband nor without him.” “It seemed to her that her husband …was urging her to grow up, and yet had left her no space to grow up into.” Her husband, the snot, tells her: “Of course I don’t respect you…Have I any reason to? I’m in love with you, unfortunately, that’s all.” How’s that for a sad state of affairs?
Her husband is researching church records at a lay religious commune affiliated with an adjoining convent of cloistered nuns. The religious commune serves as a buffer (or an entryway depending on how you look at it) between the more religious world of the convent and the material world. It’s for people who can’t find a profession like teaching or nursing endowed with spiritual significance.
One of the other main characters is a gay man who initially saw no conflict between his Anglican religion and his sexuality – they seemed to come from the same source -- until he decided he wanted to become a priest. “He was conscious of such a fund of love and goodwill for the young creature [young man] beside him. It could not be that God intended such a spring of love to be quenched utterably.” The novel has a fairly frank discussion of male homosexuality given that it was published in 1958.
The main action in the book revolves around a new bell that is to be installed at the abbey. It is to replace one that has been missing for centuries and that supposedly sunk in the lake. Dora and a young man find the old bell and raise it as a “surprise” in a comedic farce. All that serves to move the book along but it’s really a story of good and evil, morality, and people struggling to do the good thing.
Two quotes I liked:
“Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.”
Here’s a variation on the theme of rising to your highest level of incompetence: “One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles.”
The blurbs call it a “funny and sad” novel and I think that is accurate. A good read although not the author’s strongest – I still prefer Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
My GR friend Bionic Jean has written a much more detailed and thoughtful review of the book here if you are interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Photo of Buckfast Abbey, Dartmoor from britainexpress.com
Photo of the author from biography.com
May 22, 2022
Dear Dame Iris Murdoch.
I have been a fan of yours for a long time, and it has been a long time since I have read one of your novels.
I started ‘The Bell’ many years ago but didn’t finish it. I became distracted and maybe felt that I had had my fill of the Murdoch craft for a while. From memory, I also found it difficult to read the small font. Had you still been alive today, you would be amused to know most, if not all, novels are now printed in 1.5 or double line-spacing and in larger font! We also have e-books!
Your book is compact but it must have a large word count. If printed today in the requisite typesetting, it no doubt would be classed as a ‘door stopper’.
My copy ‘The Bell’ (published in 1958) sat on my bookshelf for decades and now the pages have a quaint, old-worldly yellow tinge. I’ve returned to it with a renewed excitement and the benefit of reading glasses.
It has all the hallmarks of your expertise. For example, in the span of a half-to a full page you can describe emotions and reactions that take just one second in real time – and with that, we enter entirely into your characters’ mindsets.
Your storyline, that centres on an eclectic ensemble of anxious and odd characters, striving to live together but doomed to fail in an experimental closed Anglican lay community, is brilliant.
You give us philosophy (you have been called a philosopher, haven’t you?), religion (and characters conflicted by their religious beliefs), symbolism, human relationships (good and bad), awkward human interactions (oh, you do that so well), British sharp wit, penance, social commentary on adulty and homosexuality. Your delicate and astute handling of the latter is brave and masterful, although steeped in the restrictions and prejudices of your time.
Again Dame Iris, you would be amused to learn that your abundant use of the word ‘gay’, with its derivatives ‘gaily’ and ‘gaiety’, holds a different colloquial meaning in today’s society. We have ‘gay marriage’ now, and homosexuality has been decimalised in many countries. My feeling is that you would have supported this, or at that very least, provided a detailed philosophical argument for and against it.
A few times, when I was side-tracked and skim read some passages, I returned and re-read them. I wanted every word to count. And they did.
I also learned a new word: rebarbative. You used that many times, therefore I had to google it - that’s a modern term used with ‘the Internet’ that took off at a time when your faculties were affected by the insidious Alzheimer’s Disease. What would you have thought of the Internet, I wonder?
I know many current readers find it difficult to warm to your dense, philosophical writing. I can understand that. However, for me, to return to your writing was a pleasure.
I’ve also watched a film, simply called ‘Iris’, about your life, relationships and health decline. It starred Kate Winslet and Dame Judy Dench respectively as your young and older selves. It was heartachingly honest and gives insight into what inspired you to be a novelist.
I confess, the ‘The Sea, the Sea’ remains my favourite, and I will read it again soon.
In the meantime, ‘The Bell’ deserves almost equal praise and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I’ve noticed there are many of your TV interviews available on YouTube (another modern media invention). I look forward to hearing some of your wisdom that has been archived for future generations. We also have ‘book bloggers’ today who talk about some of your other books that I’ve read: ‘The Unicorn’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’ and ‘The Philosopher’s Pupil’.
Thank you for also giving me ‘The Bell’.
Signed:
Your devoted fan.
I have been a fan of yours for a long time, and it has been a long time since I have read one of your novels.
I started ‘The Bell’ many years ago but didn’t finish it. I became distracted and maybe felt that I had had my fill of the Murdoch craft for a while. From memory, I also found it difficult to read the small font. Had you still been alive today, you would be amused to know most, if not all, novels are now printed in 1.5 or double line-spacing and in larger font! We also have e-books!
Your book is compact but it must have a large word count. If printed today in the requisite typesetting, it no doubt would be classed as a ‘door stopper’.
My copy ‘The Bell’ (published in 1958) sat on my bookshelf for decades and now the pages have a quaint, old-worldly yellow tinge. I’ve returned to it with a renewed excitement and the benefit of reading glasses.
It has all the hallmarks of your expertise. For example, in the span of a half-to a full page you can describe emotions and reactions that take just one second in real time – and with that, we enter entirely into your characters’ mindsets.
Your storyline, that centres on an eclectic ensemble of anxious and odd characters, striving to live together but doomed to fail in an experimental closed Anglican lay community, is brilliant.
You give us philosophy (you have been called a philosopher, haven’t you?), religion (and characters conflicted by their religious beliefs), symbolism, human relationships (good and bad), awkward human interactions (oh, you do that so well), British sharp wit, penance, social commentary on adulty and homosexuality. Your delicate and astute handling of the latter is brave and masterful, although steeped in the restrictions and prejudices of your time.
Again Dame Iris, you would be amused to learn that your abundant use of the word ‘gay’, with its derivatives ‘gaily’ and ‘gaiety’, holds a different colloquial meaning in today’s society. We have ‘gay marriage’ now, and homosexuality has been decimalised in many countries. My feeling is that you would have supported this, or at that very least, provided a detailed philosophical argument for and against it.
A few times, when I was side-tracked and skim read some passages, I returned and re-read them. I wanted every word to count. And they did.
I also learned a new word: rebarbative. You used that many times, therefore I had to google it - that’s a modern term used with ‘the Internet’ that took off at a time when your faculties were affected by the insidious Alzheimer’s Disease. What would you have thought of the Internet, I wonder?
I know many current readers find it difficult to warm to your dense, philosophical writing. I can understand that. However, for me, to return to your writing was a pleasure.
I’ve also watched a film, simply called ‘Iris’, about your life, relationships and health decline. It starred Kate Winslet and Dame Judy Dench respectively as your young and older selves. It was heartachingly honest and gives insight into what inspired you to be a novelist.
I confess, the ‘The Sea, the Sea’ remains my favourite, and I will read it again soon.
In the meantime, ‘The Bell’ deserves almost equal praise and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I’ve noticed there are many of your TV interviews available on YouTube (another modern media invention). I look forward to hearing some of your wisdom that has been archived for future generations. We also have ‘book bloggers’ today who talk about some of your other books that I’ve read: ‘The Unicorn’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’ and ‘The Philosopher’s Pupil’.
Thank you for also giving me ‘The Bell’.
Signed:
Your devoted fan.
November 16, 2024
"There is a story about the bell ringing sometimes in the bottom of the lake, and how if you hear it it portends a death."
The Bell is an early philosophical novel by Iris Murdoch, the Irish academic and Oxford professor of Philosophy, who also wrote in total 26 novels. This is her fourth novel, first published in 1958. The first of her novels to be shot through with ethical considerations, The Bell remains the one novel in her entire output where the moral conundrums are the most explicit. Until now, the characters in Iris Murdoch's novels had been concerned with having a good life rather than living one; a subtle difference perhaps, but a profound one.
Interestingly, Iris Murdoch once said,
"I don't think philosophy influences my work as a novelist."
Yet The Bell clearly pointed the way towards her later novels, all of which have a philosophical component. Some later ones have hints of other realities, myth, and even a touch of Eastern philosophy, despite her Western philosophical credentials.
The greater part of the action in The Bell takes place within a religious lay community living in a large house called "Imber Court", in a rural woodland area of Gloucestershire, in England. Next to Imber Court is a closed order of nuns in an Abbey, presided over by their Abbess.
This very setting emphasises the nature of the book's concerns, hinting that there will be some moral analysis through our view of the individual characters. There are three distinct groups; the order of Benedictine nuns, who live in accordance with their traditional set of moral codes, a lay community, grasping towards their own ethical system of moral purpose in life, plus a third category, various visitors, all with their own troubled and burgeoning ethical issues and problems.
All these are carefully woven together into an absorbing story. The novel begins enticingly,
"Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."
Instantly the reader is engaged. But we must not assume that the novel is going to be about Dora, an unsuccessful middle class art student, and how her life pans out after a possibly unsuitable marriage to an art historian of noble German descent. Iris Murdoch does not write straightforward novels of that type. Instead, she makes it quite clear that her interest lies with the moral dilemmas we all experience, and how each individual person is subject to different influences, depending on their personalities. Hence Dora,
"obeying that conception of fatality which served her instead of a moral sense ... left him"
Iris Murdoch has a knack for making her philosophical approach relatively seamless, so that it is perfectly possible to just read her books as straight novels. The reader can think of this simply as additional information about a character, Dora, or view it as a statement about psychological motives, plus of course it is an ethical dilemma too.
Through Dora, the reader is led towards the main focus of the book. Dora has agreed to return to her husband Paul Greenfield, who has temporarily joined the lay community at Imber Court, to work on some 14th-century manuscripts. During the train ride there, we are privy to Dora's inner turmoil. She comes across as immature, with little true self-knowledge, even rather limited in imagination, but her very frustrations and blunderings are appealing. Dora is perhaps the character least concerned with living a moral life, yet even she is wrestling with her conscience right at the beginning. We read a disjointed and absurdly lifelike set of internal arguments, conveyed with typical Murdochian wry humour,
"Dora hated pointless sacrifices. She was tired after her recent emotions and deserved a rest ... She regarded her state of distress as completely neurotic. She decided not to give up her seat.
She got up and said to the standing lady, 'Do sit down here please ...'"
Such moral deliberations are contained in almost every page. They are so true to life, and the author here shows us that despite every care we take to think through the ethics, there is always something in our imperative for goodness that we cannot reduce to rational discussion.
On the train to Imber, we are also introduced to the other impressionable young innocent of the story, the gauche Toby Gashe, who is also searching for life's meaning. He too is going to stay at the community before he goes to Oxford University. He is accompanied by a member of the community, James Tayper Pace.
The book is redolent with literary motifs and metaphors, which start immediately. During the train journey Dora notices a butterfly crawling along the carriage and picks it up to protect it from being crushed. Yet when she is met at the other end by her husband, and releases the butterfly to its freedom, she realises that she has left her suitcase on the train. What does this portend? Clearly the butterfly, originally trapped by its situation represents both freedom and fragility. But what else?
The section approaching Imber Court by car is very reminiscent of the drive to the great house of Manderley, in Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca", which the reader also sees through the eyes of an insecure young woman with a low self-image. Her feelings towards her husband seem so similar. In each case he is older, more assured and worldly-wise. Dora notices every little detail with mounting apprehension. The drive in each case feels interminable.
Reaching the house itself, Dora is introduced to all the members of the community: the head of the community, Michael Meade, assisted by Mrs Mark (Margaret Strafford), Mark Strafford, Catherine Fawley, Peter Topglass and Patchway.
Dora is perplexed by what she perceives as the overly spartan and religious overtones of the community, and feels increasingly oppressed. The huge lake features greatly in the novel, and an episode about her lost shoes is heavy with symbolism.
During that evening Paul tells Dora the terrible legend of the bell. It was said that long ago a nun had taken a lover but refused to confess. Because of this, a bishop put a curse on the Abbey, and the bell then plummeted into the lake, where it had remained ever since. The atmosphere and claustrophobia is now gently being cranked up.
At this point we meet another add-on to the community, the twin brother of Catherine. He is Nick Fawley, a slightly worse for drink reprobate, who lives slightly apart from the others. He is clearly not one of the community, but rather someone for whom they feel responsible.
It becomes clear that one of the community knew Nick from many years ago, and that there is a dark secret. We are now concentrating on each character in turn, as they struggle to cope with their lives, their fears and nightmares, and their attempts to be true to the values they have decided on. The landscape continues be described very vividly, and one scene where Toby is inadvertently viewed naked in the grounds by two other members of the community, takes on a feeling and impression of the garden of Eden.
There is underlying sexual repression and feelings of guilt, closely interconnected with the religious inclinations of the order. Different members all have their own reasons for escaping from the world outside. Michael, the leader, is subject to nightmares. He is the one most challenged by his wish to become a priest. Despite his unfortunate history, which seems scandalous to the world, but innocent enough to Michael, the idea of priesthood seems increasingly to tempt him with its possibility. But then it is quashed afresh, and relegated to being merely a lost dream, by ensuing events in the novel.
One enigma seems to be Catherine, who to Dora's horror is destined to take her vows and become part of the closed order of Benedictine nuns. Although Catherine insists she is joyful at the prospect, Dora cannot believe this. And Catherine's progress throughout the story too, is not as clearly demarcated as it appears to be at the beginning.
A new bell is commissioned to be installed in the Abbey. The book follows the story of the two bells, old and new. The old bell
Michael is very much the main character in this part of the book. His innermost thoughts are closely examined, whether it is his feeling of responsibility and tenderness towards Toby, his regrets for the past and his loss of possible priesthood, or his worries about the rest of the community, especially Nick.
Everyone appears to have secrets. Two of the community feel they are in love with others, there is a failed marriage, there is a snatched kiss, there is subterfuge. Yet we are almost always directed to feel that every individual is attempting to act by their conscience.
Unusually, there are three sermons in the novel, each made by a different member of the community. James's (at the beginning of chapter 9) and Michael's (at the beginning of chapter 16) are both religious. Each uses the metaphor of the bell to express their own personal views on life, and each has a different interpretation. The third is Nick's (at the beginning of chapter 21) which is non-religious. There are quite a few moral speeches in the novel, but none is quite so overt as these sermons: moral lectures designed to edify the listener.
James's view is that the study of personality is dangerous to goodness. Even if he cannot see how things will work out, a good person trusts and has faith in God. We should look to God's divine law to tell us what is commanded and what is forbidden. He warns that all the rest is mere vanity, self-deceit and flattery, expostulating,
"How false it is to tell our young people to seek experience!"
According to James, the marks of innocence are candour, truthfulness and simplicity, which will ring out just like the new bell which is to arrive at Imber. He believes that innocence, retained in time, becomes knowledge and wisdom. To illustrate his sermon, James speaks of Catherine, who will soon become a nun in a closed order, joining the religious community of the Abbey at Imber Court. James's ideal is that a good man is a Saint.
Michael's sermon, delivered a week after James's, starts with the same words, although Michael's idea of a good life is very different,
"The chief requirement of the good life ... is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has,"
The good man, in Michael's view, is one who has great self-knowledge, so that he can avoid temptation and direct his spiritual energy towards doing God's will. God requires us to know ourselves and our imperfections, so that we can perfect ourselves. Although what differentiates us makes each of us imperfect, Michael argues that we need such moral imperfection so that we can overcome it. Everyone has a different experience of reality and of God. We obtain moral perfection through our strength, arising both from self-knowledge and our varying experiences of reality, giving us the strength to live as spiritual beings, to act correctly and to perfect ourselves. Like James, he uses the bell to illustrate his moral conception,
"The bell is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too must learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out where, for us, are the hiding places of our strength."
Nick's sermon is individual, designed for and given to one person, and not forming part of a service. It is not "added" but forms an essential part of the plot. It is interesting to speculate whether Nick views this as only valid for this specific situation, or whether it could constitute a general moral code. Perhaps Nick would have liked to give the sermon to the rest of the community, but since they would not want to hear it, he delivers it as a private speech. It certainly offers a different ethical approach.
Nick's assertion is that a good man is one who cares. At first he sarcastically uses religious rhetoric, asserting that human beings are not innocent, as animals are, but sinners. Because of God's word, and confession, we can be saved, but had we been without sin, we would have been deprived of such pleasure.
This is a supremely moral stance. A man is not morally perfect but makes mistakes. A good man is one who, caring of both others and himself, recognises sin in others and in himself, and confesses. From Nick's point of view, he is forcing the other to admit his sins and confess them. This view can be seen as more complex than the previous ones because it includes both the ego and the alter-ego.
As the novel proceeds, Dora
Nothing happens as planned. One bell takes centre stage, revealing to all an episode of which two of the characters are thoroughly ashamed. There is an unwelcome arrival by someone intent on pointing up what he sees as the quaint nonsense of such a community in modern times. There are enjoyably farcical elements, to which the reader may have confused reactions. Events then escalate dramatically, as There is an element of poignancy and pathos within the absurdity. There is guilt, embarrassment, confession and deep shame. There is both a catastrophic accident, and a near tragedy , followed by a real tragedy .
The book has a low-key ending where all the ends are tied up. Thus the reader is left with Dora's experience and feelings in confusion, much as the novel had started,
The novel is steeped in morality, and also full of consistent literary motifs, with a recurring theme of opposites pulling in different directions. Dora's fear pulls her in opposite directions: to flee from Paul or to return to him. Michael eventually realises that his religious calling and sexual passions spring from the same source. There are two bells in the novel, one old and one new, and both named Gabriel. Imber Abbey is a strictly enclosed order of nuns and there is also a lay community of Imber Court. In the words of the Abbess, this is for those who,
"can live neither in the world nor out of it ... those unhappy souls whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely."
Thus the religious community at Imber is one, and yet also two.
All tragedies have tension, and this pattern of twinning, of opposities - sometimes allotropic where a single element exists in different possibly conflicting forms - provides the tension for the novel's plot. It is the novel's reality, enabling its moral and sometimes religious conflict. Each character is revealed with a fragmentation of their human identity in search of meaning and purpose.
This is both a philosophical and a psychological novel. In it the reader can see that, despite its religious setting, the preoccupation of the good person, rather than God, is the paramount concept in Iris Murdoch's thoughts. Throughout, the theories are diverted from the expected rhetoric about God, in order to concentrate on the search for the good. Iris Murdoch consistently gives importance to the religious dimension, both in her literary and philosophical works, but goodness reigns supreme in the development of her philosophy. Characteristically she once referred to living in an age which she called the "untheological time."
The ultimate question postulated by Iris Murdoch in this novel, is "What does it mean to be good?" Or as each member of the communities at Imber Court is prone to ask themselves,
"What is the chief requirement of the good life?"
The search for an answer to this question formed the basis for all the author's philosophical and literary works; an attempt to define the moral life. This novel just touches the surface of the question, but is a remarkable exploration of the subject, through an enjoyably accessible genre.
A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung? ... A great bell is not to be silenced ... All that it is is plain and open, and if it is moved it must ring.
The Bell is an early philosophical novel by Iris Murdoch, the Irish academic and Oxford professor of Philosophy, who also wrote in total 26 novels. This is her fourth novel, first published in 1958. The first of her novels to be shot through with ethical considerations, The Bell remains the one novel in her entire output where the moral conundrums are the most explicit. Until now, the characters in Iris Murdoch's novels had been concerned with having a good life rather than living one; a subtle difference perhaps, but a profound one.
Interestingly, Iris Murdoch once said,
"I don't think philosophy influences my work as a novelist."
Yet The Bell clearly pointed the way towards her later novels, all of which have a philosophical component. Some later ones have hints of other realities, myth, and even a touch of Eastern philosophy, despite her Western philosophical credentials.
The greater part of the action in The Bell takes place within a religious lay community living in a large house called "Imber Court", in a rural woodland area of Gloucestershire, in England. Next to Imber Court is a closed order of nuns in an Abbey, presided over by their Abbess.
This very setting emphasises the nature of the book's concerns, hinting that there will be some moral analysis through our view of the individual characters. There are three distinct groups; the order of Benedictine nuns, who live in accordance with their traditional set of moral codes, a lay community, grasping towards their own ethical system of moral purpose in life, plus a third category, various visitors, all with their own troubled and burgeoning ethical issues and problems.
All these are carefully woven together into an absorbing story. The novel begins enticingly,
"Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."
Instantly the reader is engaged. But we must not assume that the novel is going to be about Dora, an unsuccessful middle class art student, and how her life pans out after a possibly unsuitable marriage to an art historian of noble German descent. Iris Murdoch does not write straightforward novels of that type. Instead, she makes it quite clear that her interest lies with the moral dilemmas we all experience, and how each individual person is subject to different influences, depending on their personalities. Hence Dora,
"obeying that conception of fatality which served her instead of a moral sense ... left him"
Iris Murdoch has a knack for making her philosophical approach relatively seamless, so that it is perfectly possible to just read her books as straight novels. The reader can think of this simply as additional information about a character, Dora, or view it as a statement about psychological motives, plus of course it is an ethical dilemma too.
Through Dora, the reader is led towards the main focus of the book. Dora has agreed to return to her husband Paul Greenfield, who has temporarily joined the lay community at Imber Court, to work on some 14th-century manuscripts. During the train ride there, we are privy to Dora's inner turmoil. She comes across as immature, with little true self-knowledge, even rather limited in imagination, but her very frustrations and blunderings are appealing. Dora is perhaps the character least concerned with living a moral life, yet even she is wrestling with her conscience right at the beginning. We read a disjointed and absurdly lifelike set of internal arguments, conveyed with typical Murdochian wry humour,
"Dora hated pointless sacrifices. She was tired after her recent emotions and deserved a rest ... She regarded her state of distress as completely neurotic. She decided not to give up her seat.
She got up and said to the standing lady, 'Do sit down here please ...'"
Such moral deliberations are contained in almost every page. They are so true to life, and the author here shows us that despite every care we take to think through the ethics, there is always something in our imperative for goodness that we cannot reduce to rational discussion.
On the train to Imber, we are also introduced to the other impressionable young innocent of the story, the gauche Toby Gashe, who is also searching for life's meaning. He too is going to stay at the community before he goes to Oxford University. He is accompanied by a member of the community, James Tayper Pace.
The book is redolent with literary motifs and metaphors, which start immediately. During the train journey Dora notices a butterfly crawling along the carriage and picks it up to protect it from being crushed. Yet when she is met at the other end by her husband, and releases the butterfly to its freedom, she realises that she has left her suitcase on the train. What does this portend? Clearly the butterfly, originally trapped by its situation represents both freedom and fragility. But what else?
The section approaching Imber Court by car is very reminiscent of the drive to the great house of Manderley, in Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca", which the reader also sees through the eyes of an insecure young woman with a low self-image. Her feelings towards her husband seem so similar. In each case he is older, more assured and worldly-wise. Dora notices every little detail with mounting apprehension. The drive in each case feels interminable.
Reaching the house itself, Dora is introduced to all the members of the community: the head of the community, Michael Meade, assisted by Mrs Mark (Margaret Strafford), Mark Strafford, Catherine Fawley, Peter Topglass and Patchway.
Dora is perplexed by what she perceives as the overly spartan and religious overtones of the community, and feels increasingly oppressed. The huge lake features greatly in the novel, and an episode about her lost shoes is heavy with symbolism.
During that evening Paul tells Dora the terrible legend of the bell. It was said that long ago a nun had taken a lover but refused to confess. Because of this, a bishop put a curse on the Abbey, and the bell then plummeted into the lake, where it had remained ever since. The atmosphere and claustrophobia is now gently being cranked up.
At this point we meet another add-on to the community, the twin brother of Catherine. He is Nick Fawley, a slightly worse for drink reprobate, who lives slightly apart from the others. He is clearly not one of the community, but rather someone for whom they feel responsible.
It becomes clear that one of the community knew Nick from many years ago, and that there is a dark secret. We are now concentrating on each character in turn, as they struggle to cope with their lives, their fears and nightmares, and their attempts to be true to the values they have decided on. The landscape continues be described very vividly, and one scene where Toby is inadvertently viewed naked in the grounds by two other members of the community, takes on a feeling and impression of the garden of Eden.
There is underlying sexual repression and feelings of guilt, closely interconnected with the religious inclinations of the order. Different members all have their own reasons for escaping from the world outside. Michael, the leader, is subject to nightmares. He is the one most challenged by his wish to become a priest. Despite his unfortunate history, which seems scandalous to the world, but innocent enough to Michael, the idea of priesthood seems increasingly to tempt him with its possibility. But then it is quashed afresh, and relegated to being merely a lost dream, by ensuing events in the novel.
One enigma seems to be Catherine, who to Dora's horror is destined to take her vows and become part of the closed order of Benedictine nuns. Although Catherine insists she is joyful at the prospect, Dora cannot believe this. And Catherine's progress throughout the story too, is not as clearly demarcated as it appears to be at the beginning.
A new bell is commissioned to be installed in the Abbey. The book follows the story of the two bells, old and new. The old bell
Michael is very much the main character in this part of the book. His innermost thoughts are closely examined, whether it is his feeling of responsibility and tenderness towards Toby, his regrets for the past and his loss of possible priesthood, or his worries about the rest of the community, especially Nick.
Everyone appears to have secrets. Two of the community feel they are in love with others, there is a failed marriage, there is a snatched kiss, there is subterfuge. Yet we are almost always directed to feel that every individual is attempting to act by their conscience.
Unusually, there are three sermons in the novel, each made by a different member of the community. James's (at the beginning of chapter 9) and Michael's (at the beginning of chapter 16) are both religious. Each uses the metaphor of the bell to express their own personal views on life, and each has a different interpretation. The third is Nick's (at the beginning of chapter 21) which is non-religious. There are quite a few moral speeches in the novel, but none is quite so overt as these sermons: moral lectures designed to edify the listener.
James's view is that the study of personality is dangerous to goodness. Even if he cannot see how things will work out, a good person trusts and has faith in God. We should look to God's divine law to tell us what is commanded and what is forbidden. He warns that all the rest is mere vanity, self-deceit and flattery, expostulating,
"How false it is to tell our young people to seek experience!"
According to James, the marks of innocence are candour, truthfulness and simplicity, which will ring out just like the new bell which is to arrive at Imber. He believes that innocence, retained in time, becomes knowledge and wisdom. To illustrate his sermon, James speaks of Catherine, who will soon become a nun in a closed order, joining the religious community of the Abbey at Imber Court. James's ideal is that a good man is a Saint.
Michael's sermon, delivered a week after James's, starts with the same words, although Michael's idea of a good life is very different,
"The chief requirement of the good life ... is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has,"
The good man, in Michael's view, is one who has great self-knowledge, so that he can avoid temptation and direct his spiritual energy towards doing God's will. God requires us to know ourselves and our imperfections, so that we can perfect ourselves. Although what differentiates us makes each of us imperfect, Michael argues that we need such moral imperfection so that we can overcome it. Everyone has a different experience of reality and of God. We obtain moral perfection through our strength, arising both from self-knowledge and our varying experiences of reality, giving us the strength to live as spiritual beings, to act correctly and to perfect ourselves. Like James, he uses the bell to illustrate his moral conception,
"The bell is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too must learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out where, for us, are the hiding places of our strength."
Nick's sermon is individual, designed for and given to one person, and not forming part of a service. It is not "added" but forms an essential part of the plot. It is interesting to speculate whether Nick views this as only valid for this specific situation, or whether it could constitute a general moral code. Perhaps Nick would have liked to give the sermon to the rest of the community, but since they would not want to hear it, he delivers it as a private speech. It certainly offers a different ethical approach.
Nick's assertion is that a good man is one who cares. At first he sarcastically uses religious rhetoric, asserting that human beings are not innocent, as animals are, but sinners. Because of God's word, and confession, we can be saved, but had we been without sin, we would have been deprived of such pleasure.
This is a supremely moral stance. A man is not morally perfect but makes mistakes. A good man is one who, caring of both others and himself, recognises sin in others and in himself, and confesses. From Nick's point of view, he is forcing the other to admit his sins and confess them. This view can be seen as more complex than the previous ones because it includes both the ego and the alter-ego.
As the novel proceeds, Dora
Nothing happens as planned. One bell takes centre stage, revealing to all an episode of which two of the characters are thoroughly ashamed. There is an unwelcome arrival by someone intent on pointing up what he sees as the quaint nonsense of such a community in modern times. There are enjoyably farcical elements, to which the reader may have confused reactions. Events then escalate dramatically, as There is an element of poignancy and pathos within the absurdity. There is guilt, embarrassment, confession and deep shame. There is both a catastrophic accident, and a near tragedy , followed by a real tragedy .
The book has a low-key ending where all the ends are tied up. Thus the reader is left with Dora's experience and feelings in confusion, much as the novel had started,
The novel is steeped in morality, and also full of consistent literary motifs, with a recurring theme of opposites pulling in different directions. Dora's fear pulls her in opposite directions: to flee from Paul or to return to him. Michael eventually realises that his religious calling and sexual passions spring from the same source. There are two bells in the novel, one old and one new, and both named Gabriel. Imber Abbey is a strictly enclosed order of nuns and there is also a lay community of Imber Court. In the words of the Abbess, this is for those who,
"can live neither in the world nor out of it ... those unhappy souls whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely."
Thus the religious community at Imber is one, and yet also two.
All tragedies have tension, and this pattern of twinning, of opposities - sometimes allotropic where a single element exists in different possibly conflicting forms - provides the tension for the novel's plot. It is the novel's reality, enabling its moral and sometimes religious conflict. Each character is revealed with a fragmentation of their human identity in search of meaning and purpose.
This is both a philosophical and a psychological novel. In it the reader can see that, despite its religious setting, the preoccupation of the good person, rather than God, is the paramount concept in Iris Murdoch's thoughts. Throughout, the theories are diverted from the expected rhetoric about God, in order to concentrate on the search for the good. Iris Murdoch consistently gives importance to the religious dimension, both in her literary and philosophical works, but goodness reigns supreme in the development of her philosophy. Characteristically she once referred to living in an age which she called the "untheological time."
The ultimate question postulated by Iris Murdoch in this novel, is "What does it mean to be good?" Or as each member of the communities at Imber Court is prone to ask themselves,
"What is the chief requirement of the good life?"
The search for an answer to this question formed the basis for all the author's philosophical and literary works; an attempt to define the moral life. This novel just touches the surface of the question, but is a remarkable exploration of the subject, through an enjoyably accessible genre.
A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung? ... A great bell is not to be silenced ... All that it is is plain and open, and if it is moved it must ring.
November 3, 2015
"There were many people who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. Work, as it now is can rarely offer satisfaction to the half-contemplative."
In The Bell, we find such a group of individuals seeking a sort of spiritual retreat at Imber Court, a lay community attached to an enclosed order of nuns at Imber Abbey - or, as the Abbess puts it "a buffer state between the Abbey and the world, a reflection, a benevolent and useful parasite, an intermediary form of life." Murdoch does a superb job of developing her main characters of the novel. The reader becomes quite intimate with Dora, the inexperienced, unhappy wife who has come to Imber to try to make amends with her husband while he continues manuscript research at Imber; Michael, the leader of the community who struggles with his sexuality and his religion; and Toby, a carefree, innocent young man on the verge of adulthood. Also present at Imber are an assortment of secondary characters, including Paul, the bullying husband to Dora; James, Toby's mentor and a sanctimonious member of the community; Catherine, a somewhat taciturn young woman planning to take her vows to enter the adjoining convent; Nick, brother to Catherine and a very unstable man with a history of a past relationship with Michael; and the Abbess, a very forward-thinking and compassionate nun.
The pace of the novel is slow yet luxurious; the writing is so eloquent and descriptive, I just wanted to sit somewhere quietly away from the chaos of my world and immerse myself in Murdoch's prose. Descriptions of Imber Court, the abbey, the lake and the surrounding grounds were lovely. "She leaned on the balustrade between the pillars, looking down across the terrace to the lake. The sun had gone, but the western sky to her right was still full of a murky orange glow, glittering with a few feathers of pale cloud, against which a line of trees appeared black and jaggedly clear. She could also see the silhouette of a tower, which must belong to the Abbey. The lake too was glowing very slightly, darkened nearby to blackness, yet retaining here and there upon its surface a skin of almost phosphorescent light." There is also a mystery about a centuries-old bell rumored to be sunk at the bottom of the lake. The story surrounding this bell adds a level of intrigue and a sense of doom that I found very alluring. This story seems to affect some members of the community in very curious ways. These characters become quite caught up in the mystery and some have even perhaps developed a fateful link to this medieval bell. The symbolism of a swinging bell also seems to represent the struggle with certain moral and religious issues with which some members of this lay community are confronted. "The bell is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too must learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out where, for us, are the hiding places of our strength." Who will come through their moral and religious crises on the up-swing, so to speak? Can Dora rise above her feelings of inferiority to Paul and stand on her own two feet as his equal? Can Michael ask for forgiveness and find peace with his God? Will Toby rid himself of his confusion and rise above what he sees as a threat to his innocence? When Catherine says "There are things one doesn't choose... I don't mean they're forced on one. But one doesn't choose them. These are often the best things." - What does this say about her calling to a life of devotion and seclusion? Can Nick function in a world without contact with his own sister and can he rid himself of a bitterness that has sunk him to a life of depravation?
Before I wrap this up, I have to say that I just adored the Abbess in this novel. Despite her limited appearance in The Bell, she seemed to have such profound insight and I would have loved to hear from her a bit more. She imparts to Michael these brilliant words of wisdom, "Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back." Rich and thought-provoking, I truly enjoyed this, my first Iris Murdoch novel - it most certainly will not be my last.
In The Bell, we find such a group of individuals seeking a sort of spiritual retreat at Imber Court, a lay community attached to an enclosed order of nuns at Imber Abbey - or, as the Abbess puts it "a buffer state between the Abbey and the world, a reflection, a benevolent and useful parasite, an intermediary form of life." Murdoch does a superb job of developing her main characters of the novel. The reader becomes quite intimate with Dora, the inexperienced, unhappy wife who has come to Imber to try to make amends with her husband while he continues manuscript research at Imber; Michael, the leader of the community who struggles with his sexuality and his religion; and Toby, a carefree, innocent young man on the verge of adulthood. Also present at Imber are an assortment of secondary characters, including Paul, the bullying husband to Dora; James, Toby's mentor and a sanctimonious member of the community; Catherine, a somewhat taciturn young woman planning to take her vows to enter the adjoining convent; Nick, brother to Catherine and a very unstable man with a history of a past relationship with Michael; and the Abbess, a very forward-thinking and compassionate nun.
The pace of the novel is slow yet luxurious; the writing is so eloquent and descriptive, I just wanted to sit somewhere quietly away from the chaos of my world and immerse myself in Murdoch's prose. Descriptions of Imber Court, the abbey, the lake and the surrounding grounds were lovely. "She leaned on the balustrade between the pillars, looking down across the terrace to the lake. The sun had gone, but the western sky to her right was still full of a murky orange glow, glittering with a few feathers of pale cloud, against which a line of trees appeared black and jaggedly clear. She could also see the silhouette of a tower, which must belong to the Abbey. The lake too was glowing very slightly, darkened nearby to blackness, yet retaining here and there upon its surface a skin of almost phosphorescent light." There is also a mystery about a centuries-old bell rumored to be sunk at the bottom of the lake. The story surrounding this bell adds a level of intrigue and a sense of doom that I found very alluring. This story seems to affect some members of the community in very curious ways. These characters become quite caught up in the mystery and some have even perhaps developed a fateful link to this medieval bell. The symbolism of a swinging bell also seems to represent the struggle with certain moral and religious issues with which some members of this lay community are confronted. "The bell is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too must learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out where, for us, are the hiding places of our strength." Who will come through their moral and religious crises on the up-swing, so to speak? Can Dora rise above her feelings of inferiority to Paul and stand on her own two feet as his equal? Can Michael ask for forgiveness and find peace with his God? Will Toby rid himself of his confusion and rise above what he sees as a threat to his innocence? When Catherine says "There are things one doesn't choose... I don't mean they're forced on one. But one doesn't choose them. These are often the best things." - What does this say about her calling to a life of devotion and seclusion? Can Nick function in a world without contact with his own sister and can he rid himself of a bitterness that has sunk him to a life of depravation?
Before I wrap this up, I have to say that I just adored the Abbess in this novel. Despite her limited appearance in The Bell, she seemed to have such profound insight and I would have loved to hear from her a bit more. She imparts to Michael these brilliant words of wisdom, "Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back." Rich and thought-provoking, I truly enjoyed this, my first Iris Murdoch novel - it most certainly will not be my last.
April 1, 2024
Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, I love and I love!
Iris Murdoch’s The Bell takes place within a religious lay community called Imber Court nestled away in the secluded woods of Gloucestershire. This mysterious community is a buffer zone or a refuge for those sick people who can neither live in nor out of the world who cannot live in the normal society. Some of these people are in search of something spiritual or in search of themselves, while others are running away from something. Many times, that something turns out to be love. In its variety of forms - higher love that comes from God who is himself love, one that is for all humankind, selfless love striving for the wellbeing of others, self-love, not exactly like selfish love or that as a moral flow, but one of a self discovery, romantic love, platonic love, obsessive love and possessive love, which might not be love at all. Yes, it is almost daunting that the characters in The Bell use the word love for so many different feelings, emotions and behavioral phenomena. Iris Murdoch paints truly complex inner lives and interpersonal relationships between her characters.
One of the first scenes in the novel where a character finds herself in a situation of whether she should or not give up her seat to a person who might need it more than her is deceivingly insignificant - in a way Murdoch holds up a mirror for the reader. What is the right thing to do? Many times the characters have to deal with moral and ethical issues, so their moral compass, just like that of the reader will be challenged. Bur Murdoch’s work in itself is neither moralistic or didactic - she trusts her readers enough so they can make up their own mind.
Having read The Unicorn and The Sea, The Sea, I can’t help but notice that the setting, the place or the landscape of the novel becomes deeply interconnected with the psychological landscape of the novel. Imber Court becomes a storage space for repressions and desires as well as a purgatory which doesn’t really bring purification or salvation yet a possibility of challenge and transformation. Similarly to the remote estate of Gaze Castle in The Unicorn and Charles Arrowby’s solitary house on a promontory by the sea in The Sea, The Sea, Imber Court feels like an idyllic refuge from reality in the midst of hot melting summer - all of them remind me of “hortus conclusus”, a kind of enclosed paradise, an attempt to tame unruly nature. On one hand it might stand for introspection and privacy, but, on the other hand, for confinement and (sometimes voluntary) imprisonment. There is a Gothic aspect to Murdoch’s settings - despite their idyllic atmosphere there is a sense of mystery and foreboding. Human frailty can be terrifying. As A.S. Byatt cleverly puts it, there’s the sense in her novels that anything is possible - and nothing goes as planned.
Ego Vox Amoris Sum
There is a story about the bell ringing sometimes in the bottom of the lake, and how if you hear it it portends a death.
There are many symbols or rather anti-symbols in this novel, the bell from the title is both a real object and a metaphor. A bell is made to ring, its truth-telling voice cannot be silenced.
A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung? It rings out clearly, it bears witness, it cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons. A great bell is not to be silenced. Consider too its simplicity. There is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open; and if it is moved it must ring.
But what is truth? How can we be true to ourselves?
The bell is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too must learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out where, for us, are the hiding places of our strength.
Iris Murdoch likes to play with the idea of sacred and profane, turning conventions and symbols on their head. There is a sense of recurrence: some scenes happen twice in reality but also in a myth or a dream.
A somewhat rebarbative adventure
Iris Murdoch is an author who has grown on me - she can be incredibly profound yet playful and humorous, I really laughed through many scenes. The narrative is presented through different points of view, some of them with a rebarbative tone. For example, a character learns this word and takes it to heart.
It certainly constituted an adventure, though a somewhat rebarbative one.
There is also a rebarbative dog, and even the bell from the title becomes a rebarbative thing. Of course it was in The Bell that I first encountered this word, the way Murdoch channeled the character’s point of view and played with it was comical and clever.
Though for me The Bell turned out to be quite a page-turner, I feel this novel might be rebarbative in a way - some readers might find the themes dated, some of the words Murdoch uses have a different meaning in the contemporary world. In my humble opinion, she portrayed some scenes ambiguously enough and it’s up to the reader to come to the conclusions. Although I do believe that she might have expressed her own point of view through some lines:
Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
All visual art is by Odilon Redon
The opening title is from Answer to a Child’s Question by Samuel Taylor Coleridge discovered via A Child's Question, August
The Linnet and Thrush say, I love and I love!
Iris Murdoch’s The Bell takes place within a religious lay community called Imber Court nestled away in the secluded woods of Gloucestershire. This mysterious community is a buffer zone or a refuge for those sick people who can neither live in nor out of the world who cannot live in the normal society. Some of these people are in search of something spiritual or in search of themselves, while others are running away from something. Many times, that something turns out to be love. In its variety of forms - higher love that comes from God who is himself love, one that is for all humankind, selfless love striving for the wellbeing of others, self-love, not exactly like selfish love or that as a moral flow, but one of a self discovery, romantic love, platonic love, obsessive love and possessive love, which might not be love at all. Yes, it is almost daunting that the characters in The Bell use the word love for so many different feelings, emotions and behavioral phenomena. Iris Murdoch paints truly complex inner lives and interpersonal relationships between her characters.
One of the first scenes in the novel where a character finds herself in a situation of whether she should or not give up her seat to a person who might need it more than her is deceivingly insignificant - in a way Murdoch holds up a mirror for the reader. What is the right thing to do? Many times the characters have to deal with moral and ethical issues, so their moral compass, just like that of the reader will be challenged. Bur Murdoch’s work in itself is neither moralistic or didactic - she trusts her readers enough so they can make up their own mind.
Having read The Unicorn and The Sea, The Sea, I can’t help but notice that the setting, the place or the landscape of the novel becomes deeply interconnected with the psychological landscape of the novel. Imber Court becomes a storage space for repressions and desires as well as a purgatory which doesn’t really bring purification or salvation yet a possibility of challenge and transformation. Similarly to the remote estate of Gaze Castle in The Unicorn and Charles Arrowby’s solitary house on a promontory by the sea in The Sea, The Sea, Imber Court feels like an idyllic refuge from reality in the midst of hot melting summer - all of them remind me of “hortus conclusus”, a kind of enclosed paradise, an attempt to tame unruly nature. On one hand it might stand for introspection and privacy, but, on the other hand, for confinement and (sometimes voluntary) imprisonment. There is a Gothic aspect to Murdoch’s settings - despite their idyllic atmosphere there is a sense of mystery and foreboding. Human frailty can be terrifying. As A.S. Byatt cleverly puts it, there’s the sense in her novels that anything is possible - and nothing goes as planned.
Ego Vox Amoris Sum
There is a story about the bell ringing sometimes in the bottom of the lake, and how if you hear it it portends a death.
There are many symbols or rather anti-symbols in this novel, the bell from the title is both a real object and a metaphor. A bell is made to ring, its truth-telling voice cannot be silenced.
A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung? It rings out clearly, it bears witness, it cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons. A great bell is not to be silenced. Consider too its simplicity. There is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open; and if it is moved it must ring.
But what is truth? How can we be true to ourselves?
The bell is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too must learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out where, for us, are the hiding places of our strength.
Iris Murdoch likes to play with the idea of sacred and profane, turning conventions and symbols on their head. There is a sense of recurrence: some scenes happen twice in reality but also in a myth or a dream.
A somewhat rebarbative adventure
Iris Murdoch is an author who has grown on me - she can be incredibly profound yet playful and humorous, I really laughed through many scenes. The narrative is presented through different points of view, some of them with a rebarbative tone. For example, a character learns this word and takes it to heart.
It certainly constituted an adventure, though a somewhat rebarbative one.
There is also a rebarbative dog, and even the bell from the title becomes a rebarbative thing. Of course it was in The Bell that I first encountered this word, the way Murdoch channeled the character’s point of view and played with it was comical and clever.
Though for me The Bell turned out to be quite a page-turner, I feel this novel might be rebarbative in a way - some readers might find the themes dated, some of the words Murdoch uses have a different meaning in the contemporary world. In my humble opinion, she portrayed some scenes ambiguously enough and it’s up to the reader to come to the conclusions. Although I do believe that she might have expressed her own point of view through some lines:
Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
All visual art is by Odilon Redon
The opening title is from Answer to a Child’s Question by Samuel Taylor Coleridge discovered via A Child's Question, August
February 5, 2024
“… la campana tañe a veces en el fondo del lago, y si se oye, presagia una muerte”Con su habitual ritmo lento y reflexivo, con el tono entre serio y cómico que es marca de la casa, Murdoch trata en esta su cuarta novela los temas acostumbrados —la bondad, el amor, la verdad, la amistad, la libertad, la espiritualidad— en esa mezcla tan maravillosa de embrollos vodevilescos e intensas luchas morales de los protagonistas que, digámoslo también, no siempre actúan de una forma fácilmente comprensible, buscando, creo yo, el efecto en el lector que se deriva del hecho incuestionable, según Murdoch, de que el carácter inagotable de las personas es lo que nos enamora.
En un contexto religioso —una comunidad laica asociada a un convento de monjas de clausura—, se contraponen dos modelos de vida:
“El principal requisito de una vida de bien es vivir sin ninguna imagen de uno mismo”Dos formas bien distintas de entender al ser humano y su forma de estar en el mundo. Uno resalta nuestra inclinación natural a tomar siempre las peores decisiones y la necesidad, por tanto, de contar con una precisa guía de actuación que ha de cumplirse sin cuestionamiento alguno.
“El principal requisito de una vida de bien es tener una idea de las propias posibilidades”
“¡Qué falsedad es decirles a nuestros jóvenes que busquen experiencia! ¡Más bien habría que decirles que valoren y conserven su inocencia…!... ¿Y cuáles son las señales de la inocencia? El candor, palabra maravillosa, la sinceridad, la sencillez, un dar testimonio involuntariamente… Una campana se hace para que suene ¿Cuál sería el valor de una campana que nunca fuera tañida? Suena con claridad, da testimonio, no puede hablar sin que parezca una llamada, una cita…. Consideremos también su sencillez… todo lo que hay en ella es claro y abierto; y si la mueven, debe sonar.”En el otro se impulsa a mirar dentro de uno mismo en el convencimiento de que todos, como criaturas del señor, disponemos de un radar sobre lo que está bien y lo que está mal, aunque cada uno tenga su particular forma de verlo.
Por estas dos vías van a transitar los caminos de los diversos personajes con mayor o menor fortuna, y no siempre de forma deliberada pues sus impulsos y sentimientos con frecuencia les desbordan, especialmente los sexuales con su, muchas veces, humillante exigencia y premura.
“Mediante una dialéctica que conocen bien aquellos que habitualmente sucumben a la tentación, pasó en un segundo del momento en que era demasiado pronto al momento en que era demasiado tarde para luchar”Los encargados de levantar el telón e hilo conductor de toda la historia son el extraño matrimonio formado por Dora y Paul. Ella es irreflexiva, alocada y vital, uno de los seres inocentes de esta historia (el tema de la inocencia y su quebrantamiento es un punto crucial de la novela). Se casó con él deslumbrada por su aire de autoridad, por su integridad y rectitud, también un poco por su dinero. Su agradecida sumisión es lo que él cree merecer de ella, a quién dice amar aunque es más bien la imagen que ella le devuelve de sí mismo el verdadero objeto de su amor.
Michael Meade, el verdadero protagonista de la novela, es el dueño de Imber Court, la imponente y decadente casa en la que vive la comunidad. Su ambición es convertirse en sacerdote, aunque para ello deberá previamente armonizar sus deseos sexuales con sus principios religiosos. Un deseo sexual que le llevó a tener una aventura con un alumno, por lo que fue despedido del colegio en el que trabajaba (pero no denunciado). Ese alumno, Nick, convertido en un juguete roto, vive ahora en la comunidad acompañando a su hermana Catherine (seres inocentes los dos) que tiene el propósito de entrar en el convento. Catherine es considerada prácticamente una santa por la comunidad, algo que llama la atención de Noel, el ex amante de Dora, que comenta:
“Si la gente quiere dejar de ser parte útil y corriente de la sociedad y llevar sus neurosis a un lugar lejano para tener lo que ellos consideran experiencias espirituales, no me cabe duda de que hay que dejarles hacerlo, pero no veo ninguna razón para que se les venere.”El último personaje principal, la cuarta criatura inocente, es Toby, que pasa unos días en Imber Court antes de iniciar la universidad. Toby en un joven ingenuo, quizá demasiado, nada perturba su espíritu y menos que nada el sexo o el amor, temas a los que quizá tendrá que enfrentarse en un futuro. Un hecho romperá la paz de su espíritu y, como si hubiera comido de la manzana prohibida de su particular edén, se le activarán sus instintos (también de una forma muy sorprendente para un chaval de 18 años).
No es esta la mejor novela de Iris Murdoch. Sus dilatados inicios, previos al meollo de la novela (casi un tercio de esta), me pareció algo excesivo e innecesario. Sus descripciones continuas y prolijas — rostros, gestos, vestimentas, estancias, paisajes…—, algo característico de su estilo y que sus lectores no dejamos de apreciar, aquí pecan de una minuciosidad y una frecuencia que en momentos ha llegado a exasperarme. Y aun así, la novela sigue estando muy por encima de la gran mayoría de lo que se publica y se vende por aquí: 3,5 estrellas, que redondeo a 4.
February 8, 2022
Good and bad things are inextricably smooshed together in Iris Murdoch’s hoity toity novel. For a start, don’t look for any characters that don’t go to Oxford or don’t live in London, unless it’s a gardener. We are in the land of posh. But then, you can’t really dislike a 1958 novel that has such a sympathetic presentation of a gay man who keeps falling for (very) inappropriately young boys.
On the other hand, it’s kind of aggravating that everything, like I mean EVERYTHING in this novel, is symbolic – obv THE BELL is (both of them); the dog is; the swimming nun is; the weather is; the butterfly the lady rescued in the train compartment is; the lake is; the big country house is; there is nothing in an Iris Murdoch novel that doesn’t symbolise something else, something really chinscratchingly abstract probably. It’s kind of exhausting, your brain at some point will go yeah yeah, okay okay.
YOU SAY PHILOSOPHY, I SAY TOMATO
People say oh Iris Murdoch wrote philosophical novels. Well, occasionally the action stops and the characters start to mull. This is what I mean. Some guy is spouting on page 131:
Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection?...
And blah blah blah. I guess it’s philosophy, but it sounded like profound white noise to me a lot of the time.
It's like she writes serious farces; the plot is full of wacky unlooked-for things happening that might be thought of as funny, but no, wipe that smile off, Iris is going to muse upon them for a page and find some jawbreakers in them.
KEEP AWAY FROM RUNAROUND SUE
There is a dour scholar who has a flighty young wife. I don’t know if Iris was trying to make him a comedy character but he is inclined to say stuff like
Your escapades have diminished you permanently in my eyes.
And later
Don’t paw me. I’m not sexually attracted to you at this moment. I sometimes wonder if I ever will be again.
When his wife Dora apologises for whatever it was she’d done wrong (being alive probably) he says
How absolutely not enough that is!
Hilarious!
A TYPICAL CAREFREE MOMENT FROM THE 1950s, BEFORE ALL THIS HEALTH AND SAFETY NONSENSE MADE LIFE UNBEARABLE
It was foolish of him to have had that second pint of strong cider; he was so unused to the stuff now, it had made him quite tipsy. But he knew he would be all right once he got into the van; the driving would sober him up.
(And the driving does sober him up!)
A TYPICAL CAREFREE MOMENT FROM THE 1950s, BEFORE HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY WAS MADE COMPULSORY FOR EVERYONE
Toby [he is 18 by the way] was not in the habit of sitting and brooding. Usually he was active, practical, and without a care in the world. With the simplicity which goes with a certain sort of excellent up-bringing* he had regarded himself as not yet grown up. Men had never troubled him nor women neither. “Falling in love” he regarded as something reserved for the future.
(*i.e. English upper middle class)
AND YET
I kind of liked this – the whole thing of an atheist writing about sincerely religious people was very good, most of the characters weren’t made of cardboard, it kept me reading all the way to the end but would I recommend it to you lovely GR people?
Not really.
On the other hand, it’s kind of aggravating that everything, like I mean EVERYTHING in this novel, is symbolic – obv THE BELL is (both of them); the dog is; the swimming nun is; the weather is; the butterfly the lady rescued in the train compartment is; the lake is; the big country house is; there is nothing in an Iris Murdoch novel that doesn’t symbolise something else, something really chinscratchingly abstract probably. It’s kind of exhausting, your brain at some point will go yeah yeah, okay okay.
YOU SAY PHILOSOPHY, I SAY TOMATO
People say oh Iris Murdoch wrote philosophical novels. Well, occasionally the action stops and the characters start to mull. This is what I mean. Some guy is spouting on page 131:
Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection?...
And blah blah blah. I guess it’s philosophy, but it sounded like profound white noise to me a lot of the time.
It's like she writes serious farces; the plot is full of wacky unlooked-for things happening that might be thought of as funny, but no, wipe that smile off, Iris is going to muse upon them for a page and find some jawbreakers in them.
KEEP AWAY FROM RUNAROUND SUE
There is a dour scholar who has a flighty young wife. I don’t know if Iris was trying to make him a comedy character but he is inclined to say stuff like
Your escapades have diminished you permanently in my eyes.
And later
Don’t paw me. I’m not sexually attracted to you at this moment. I sometimes wonder if I ever will be again.
When his wife Dora apologises for whatever it was she’d done wrong (being alive probably) he says
How absolutely not enough that is!
Hilarious!
A TYPICAL CAREFREE MOMENT FROM THE 1950s, BEFORE ALL THIS HEALTH AND SAFETY NONSENSE MADE LIFE UNBEARABLE
It was foolish of him to have had that second pint of strong cider; he was so unused to the stuff now, it had made him quite tipsy. But he knew he would be all right once he got into the van; the driving would sober him up.
(And the driving does sober him up!)
A TYPICAL CAREFREE MOMENT FROM THE 1950s, BEFORE HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY WAS MADE COMPULSORY FOR EVERYONE
Toby [he is 18 by the way] was not in the habit of sitting and brooding. Usually he was active, practical, and without a care in the world. With the simplicity which goes with a certain sort of excellent up-bringing* he had regarded himself as not yet grown up. Men had never troubled him nor women neither. “Falling in love” he regarded as something reserved for the future.
(*i.e. English upper middle class)
AND YET
I kind of liked this – the whole thing of an atheist writing about sincerely religious people was very good, most of the characters weren’t made of cardboard, it kept me reading all the way to the end but would I recommend it to you lovely GR people?
Not really.
March 29, 2018
This is the first novel by Iris Murdoch that I have read. It was the author’s fourth novel, published in 1958. The story begins with young wife, Dora Greenfield, who, having left her husband, Paul, is now returning to reunite with him. Paul Greenfield is staying at Imber Court, while studying fourteenth century manuscripts at Imber Abbey, a Benedictine Convent.
The lay community at Imber Court is headed by Michael Meade. The group of people staying at Imber include a young student, Toby Gash, James Tayper Pace, who had been a youth group leader in East London, Catherine Fawley, who is planning to become a nun and her twin brother, Nick, who has a drinking problem and a history with Michael, the rather bossy, Mrs Mark, and others.
The Abbey is about to receive a new bell, which is to replace the missing one from the bell tower. There is a story that the original bell flew from the tower into the lake, and it is this event which forms the central strand of the novels story. However, the novel feeds off the relationships between the characters of the lay community – that ‘buffer state’ between the Abbey and the world, for those can’t live either in or out of the world…
As Dora and Paul play out their marital troubles in front of an audience, it soon becomes clear to Dora that their past is all too well known to the other members of the community, and, meanwhile, other relationships form and grow. Michael, troubled by the brooding presence of Nick, drinking in the lodge by the lake, is attracted to young Toby. Then Dora and Toby become involved in a drama of their own, concerning the bell.
At first, I found this novel difficult to get into. I found some of the characters quite infuriating and nearly gave up. However, the writing was good enough to pull me in and, gradually, I fell into the pace of the novel. This has the feel of a sultry, English summer; when time seems to last forever and nothing ever changes. I have stayed in communities such as these, when I was younger – in my schooldays – and thought it was very well written and realistic, complete with all the repressed passions, undercurrents, resentments and petty quarrels that erupt among any group of people living together. I am glad I stayed with the book and eventually enjoyed it very much.
The lay community at Imber Court is headed by Michael Meade. The group of people staying at Imber include a young student, Toby Gash, James Tayper Pace, who had been a youth group leader in East London, Catherine Fawley, who is planning to become a nun and her twin brother, Nick, who has a drinking problem and a history with Michael, the rather bossy, Mrs Mark, and others.
The Abbey is about to receive a new bell, which is to replace the missing one from the bell tower. There is a story that the original bell flew from the tower into the lake, and it is this event which forms the central strand of the novels story. However, the novel feeds off the relationships between the characters of the lay community – that ‘buffer state’ between the Abbey and the world, for those can’t live either in or out of the world…
As Dora and Paul play out their marital troubles in front of an audience, it soon becomes clear to Dora that their past is all too well known to the other members of the community, and, meanwhile, other relationships form and grow. Michael, troubled by the brooding presence of Nick, drinking in the lodge by the lake, is attracted to young Toby. Then Dora and Toby become involved in a drama of their own, concerning the bell.
At first, I found this novel difficult to get into. I found some of the characters quite infuriating and nearly gave up. However, the writing was good enough to pull me in and, gradually, I fell into the pace of the novel. This has the feel of a sultry, English summer; when time seems to last forever and nothing ever changes. I have stayed in communities such as these, when I was younger – in my schooldays – and thought it was very well written and realistic, complete with all the repressed passions, undercurrents, resentments and petty quarrels that erupt among any group of people living together. I am glad I stayed with the book and eventually enjoyed it very much.
September 30, 2015
Opening lines:
Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six month later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absences.
Well, colour me intrigued by this passage and thrilled to follow up on the tribulations of this young woman as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and of (possible) liberation from the expectations of conformity to social rules, as set up by her husband and by the lay religious community he lives with currently. Dora is an easy character to root for, an instinctive rebel against oppresive morals and an energetic, impulsive, candid exponent of youthful exuberance.
Dora, who had so lately discovered in herself a talent for happiness, was the more dismayed to find that she could be happy neither with her husband nor without him.
As she goes back to her husband by train, she easily gets distracted by a passing butterfly, enough to make her forget where she is and what she is supposed to do. This early scene is a great set-up of mood, an early raising of the barricades between Dora and the lay community where she is headed. I knew in advance which side I will root for, but I will confess that I was still pleasantly surprised by the subtlety and the thoroughness of the investigation by Iris Murdoch, of the conflict between living in the world of the senses and the retreat, the isolation promoted by the members of the commune as a path to spiritual enlightenment.
As the Abbess of the neighboring enclosed order of nuns that encouraged and supported the establishment of the lay religious community explains:
There were many people who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. Work, as it is now, can rarely offer satisfaction to the half-contemplative.
Dora's husband Paul is a visitor and not a full member of this community, studying ancient manuscripts at the monastery. He is so full of himself, so conscious of his own intellectual worth that he has little sympathy to spare for the inner turmoil of his wife, dismissing all her feelings as pitiful and misguided. All he wants is an obedient admirer, a pretty doll to show off to his friends, and he is more angry about the social scandal of her departure than of her apparent promiscuous adventures. Paul hopes the rest of the members of the commune will help him bring Dora to order. But, like all men discover sooner or later, women's logic is a lot more convoluted and arbitrary that the reputed straight line train of thought of the male.
The past was never real for Dora. The notion that Paul might keep her past alive to torment her with, now occured to her for the first time.
This introduction to the struggle for domination in the couple dynamics would have been enough for me to enjoy the novel, but Murdoch has a lot more cooked up in this novel. I like to imagine her as one of the greatest explorers of the twentieth century. Instead of re-discovering America, she goes in deep, like a spelunker with a powerful flashlight, investigating the twisted tunnels and the dark caverns of the soul. Here is Dora, the sinner, ready to love and to enjoy life, held down by a jealous, possesive husband. Here is Michael, a lay preacher, torn apart between his thirst for divine absolution and his earthy attraction to young boys. Here is James Tayler Pace the stern, ascetic, fundamentalist group leader who urges us to discard everything but the teachings of the Holy Book if we want to be saved. Here is the angsty, malicious young man Nick Fawley, who hovers alone at the borders of the commune, both wanting in and despising the conventionality of the others. Here is his beautiful and reserved sister Catherine, who is getting ready to renounce the world and join the convent. And finally, here is the young and innocent Toby, attracted to the lay community by the promise of a spiritual life, enthusiastic like Dora by the fields, the forest, the lake, the mystery of the nuns hiding behind the tall wall of their monastery.
We get to spend quality time inside each of these people's minds, unravelling their self-justifications, their self-deceptions and their occasional honest efforts to become better persons. In the age old dialectic between the sacred and the prophane, we might conclude that real life is a muddle, bringing the idealistic dreamers back with their feet on the ground, exposing the lies and the sometimes malicious atitudes of the allegedly pure of heart, yet a wonder to behold to those who are still ready for and accepting of new experiences. I understand from the biographic notes on the author that she greatly admires Shakespeare, and I can easily see why as I think back to all the comedy walking hand in hand with tragedy around the fields of Imber Abbey. A comparison between "A Midsummer Night Dream" and "The Bell" may seem forced, especially since the plots have little in common, but my fancy refuses to listen to my voice of reason. I laughed out loud as Dora and Toby, the two exponents of irrepressible joy in life, set out to rock the peace of the place with a little subversive action . And I was dismayed as the hijinks of the commune members drive
Prophecy and Foreshadowing
... is not exclusive to fantasy literature, and can be a powerful tool in the hands of a master storyteller. As Paul narrates to Dora the legend of the old monastery bell, we can think ahead and fit the metaphor around the current occupants of the grounds, feeling drawn either to the stern discipline of the religious or to the subversive attraction of the sinners.
... sometime in the fourteenth century, that was before the dissolution, the story runs that one of the nuns had a lover. Not that that was so very unusual I daresay at that time, but this order had evidently had a high standard. It was not known who the nun was. The young man was seen climbing the wall once or twice and ended up by falling and breaking his neck. The wall, which still exists incidentally, is very high.
The Abbess called on the guilty nun to confess, but no one came forward. Then the Bishop was called in. The Bishop, who was an especially holy and spiritual man, also demanded that the guilty one should confess. When there was still no response he put a curse on the Abbey, and as the chronicler puts it, the great bell "flew like a bird out of the tower and fell into the lake".
- Good heavens! said Dora.
- That wasn't the end, said Paul. The guilty nun was so overwhelmed by this demonstration that she forthwith run out of the Abbey gates and drowned herself in the lake.
Two paths to salvation
The lay community has two leaders, Michael and James, who argue in their Sunday sermons for the correct path to a true spiritual life. Michael the fundamentalist is in favour of abandoning reason and free-will for a return to 'innocence', for reaping the benefits of faith only through the absolute truth of the Bible, ready to condemn all tresspasing of the Law:
And what are the marks of innocence? Candour - a beautiful word - truthfulness, simplicity, a quite involuntary bearing of witness. The image that occurs to me here is a topical one, the image of a bell. A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung? It rings out clearly, it bears witness, it cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons. A great bell is not to be silenced. Consider too its simplicity. There is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open; and if it is moved it must ring.
Michael, whose struggles to reconcile the condemnation of his homosexual nature in the holy texts with the inner need for spiritual meaning, argues in favour of the questioning mind and of learning from experience, as only the struggle to overcome our limitations is able to make us worthy of redemption:
Each one of us apprehends a certain kind and degree of reality and from this springs our power to live as spiritual beings: and by using and enjoying what we already know we can hope to learn more. Self-knowledge will lead us to avoid occasions of temptation rather than to rely on naked strength to overcome them.
Rebarbative
I confess I had little sympathy for the inner torment of Michael, as he seemed to me a clear example of not practising what he preaches.
. I don't hold much for irresistible impulses, especially from persons in a position of power over young minds. Once again, though, I take a bow for Iris Murdoch who deftly made the situation more ambiguous and less clear cut than my own preconceived ideas led me to judge.
As for the 'rebarbative' pitch, I liked the way the notion is used to define young Toby, still in school and anxious to seem more sophisticated and mature by using words newly learned from a dictionary, applying them with or without connection to the situation he finds himself in.
Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection. Toby had passed, it seemed to him in an instant, from a joy that had seemed impregnable into an agitation which he scarcely understood.
This rite of passage is inevitable in life, but any kid who can still laugh and pick himself up, then jump right into the soup after a doozy of a shock I believe will be better from the experience:
It certainly constituted an adventure, though a somewhat rebarbative one.
"Vox ego sum Amoris. Gabriel vocor."
The bell from the title is both real and a metaphor (and it has a twin in the best tradition of Shakespearean comedy). To the religious (like James) Gabriel's voice is a call to repent and live free of sin. To Dora, the ringing of the bell is the symbol of her emancipation:
It was as if, for her, this was to be a magical act of shattering significance, a sort of rite of power and liberation.
To me as current reader of the novel (incidentally Gabriel is my middle name), it is a reminder that most of our actions are driven by love. Not a new discovery by any means, as I can probably shoehorn every book I read into a hero on a quest for love story: either self-absorbtion, love of war, religious fervor, passionate love, intellectual love (curiosity), love of mischief, and so on until I get a thousand different faces of "vox amoris".
Back to the Sacred and the Prophane
The end of the novel is a magnificent muddle, airing the dirty laundry of the commune out in the open, mixing the laughter with the tears, and offering no clear answer, favouring neither seclusion from society nor full embrace of materialism and moral relativism. Dora takes again center stage as her initial middle of the road stance, with or without Paul, is not a viable position in a long term relationship. She is not cut out for the monastic lifestyle:
She was amazed to find, when she stepped out onto the platform at Paddington, that it was not yet midday. She stood for a while and let the crowds course round her, delighting in the rush and jostling, the din of voices and trains, the smells of oil and steam and dirt, the grimy hurly-burly and kind, healing anonymity of London.
... and she is too intelligent to renounce her own ideals in order to placate an obtuse husband:
she felt that she would never manage to live with Paul until she could treat with him, in some sense, as an equal.
So she's (literally) learning to swim by herself, throwing timidity and insecurity overboard, living and enjoying life on her own terms, and not by some antiquated tribal rulebook. As Michael elegantly concludes:
He felt, in the case of Dora too, that there was little point in forcing her willy-nilly into a machine of sin and repentance which was alien to her nature. Perhaps Dora would repent after her own fashion; perhaps she would be saved after her own fashion.
Much as I enjoyed Dora as a poster child of feminism in the modern age, I feel a final word more respectful of the people who truly need a life of contemplation and seclusion from a world gone mad is in order. We may disagree with their lifestyle, but that doesn't mean we must ridicule all they believe in, or that we cannot find wisdom in their kindness. So here's what the Abbess have to say to us sinners:
Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend; but we achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
May 16, 2019
'This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ - Shakespeare, Hamlet
The setting for The Bell is Imber Court, a palladian country mansion that is home to an Anglican Benedictine commune in Gloucestershire, just outside the walls of an Anglican convent. The Imber commune consists of a group of lay, religious people who seek a retreat from the world to live, for a spell at least, an ascetic and pious life. Life here is intended to be simple – prayer and tending a vegetable garden. But it is not to be.
Imber Court belongs to Michael Meade, the de factor leader, who along with a handful of devoted Anglicans, provide administrative and operational support for the commune. Michael (in his 30s), the key character in this story, was a former school teacher with a sketchy past in which his desire to be an ordained priest was foiled when he was dismissed for allegedly seducing his 14-year-old student, Nick Fawley. Years later (when the novel begins), Michael is put in a quandary to accept into Imber Court this same young man, now in his twenties, who is given to alcohol and suicidal ideation. Michael struggles excessively with his homosexuality and feels drawn again to Nick. To complicate things, into this commune comes Toby Gashe, a 18-year-old, carefree, youth who is seeking a religious retreat at Imber as preparation for Oxford. The story that unfolds is a tragic one that has devastating consequences for all involved.
Other characters provide the adrenaline that drives the plot in this masterfully narrated story. The character that grew on me is Dora Greenfield, a 21-year-old errant wife who, in her unhappy marriage, has run away, but is now compelled to return to her authoritarian husband, the art historian Dr. Paul Greenfield who is working on 14th century manuscripts that belonged to the Anglican convent. Paul is an intensely jealous man who watches his wife like a hawk. In a few pages, Murdoch painted for us a sympathetic profile of a flighty woman, not given to reflection, yet keenly aware of her husband’s contempt for her, and endearing in her scatter-brained but spontaneous responses to things that happen to her. It was a pleasure to see how Dora finds her own confidence and independence. There is Catherine Fawley, Nick’s twin sister, an angelic young woman who will soon take vows to become a nun. Beneath that fairy-like exterior churns deep psychological issues that took the reader by surprise.
But what about the bell, that carries the title of this novel? The Imber commune is looking forward to having a new bell installed and christened in the Abbey Tower. Legend has it that the old bell is accursed. It is said to be lying at the bottom of the lake. And woe betide the village whenever it rings again from the murky depths.
Murdoch wrote a prose style that is richly evocative. She created the stuffy and cloistered air at Imber court, the charm of the forests with its profusion of bird song, and the serenity and lure of the lake. So, the reader fleeing Imber Court with Dora or Toby senses the freedom that the natural world offers up as a foil to an artificially spiritual enclave.
Thematically, this is a very difficult novel to read. The Bell is about love and freedom; it is also about homosexuality and spirituality. This book was published in 1958. It is hard to fathom how incredibly painful it must be, sixty years ago, to be gay and deeply religious, not that it is necessarily easier now. Michael is fettered by his spirituality, so he is unable to love as he is inclined to, and this is what makes this story extremely sad. In his own words, ‘Spiritual power was indeed like electricity in that it was thoroughly dangerous. It could perform miracles of good: it could also bring about destruction.’
A recurring theme is truth, 'the truth-telling voice that must not be silenced.’ The tragedy in this story is the inability of several of its characters to be true to themselves and to be truthful. The consequences are severe.
The Bell is a satire on the religious life. We see in the Imber commune merely the form of organized religion; it has no substance. The ending, therefore, comes as no surprise.
There is perhaps ‘a higher and a better way’ to living a good life. I will close with the words of the Abbess to Michael, which brings me comfort at the end of this disturbing novel: ‘…we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.’
The setting for The Bell is Imber Court, a palladian country mansion that is home to an Anglican Benedictine commune in Gloucestershire, just outside the walls of an Anglican convent. The Imber commune consists of a group of lay, religious people who seek a retreat from the world to live, for a spell at least, an ascetic and pious life. Life here is intended to be simple – prayer and tending a vegetable garden. But it is not to be.
Imber Court belongs to Michael Meade, the de factor leader, who along with a handful of devoted Anglicans, provide administrative and operational support for the commune. Michael (in his 30s), the key character in this story, was a former school teacher with a sketchy past in which his desire to be an ordained priest was foiled when he was dismissed for allegedly seducing his 14-year-old student, Nick Fawley. Years later (when the novel begins), Michael is put in a quandary to accept into Imber Court this same young man, now in his twenties, who is given to alcohol and suicidal ideation. Michael struggles excessively with his homosexuality and feels drawn again to Nick. To complicate things, into this commune comes Toby Gashe, a 18-year-old, carefree, youth who is seeking a religious retreat at Imber as preparation for Oxford. The story that unfolds is a tragic one that has devastating consequences for all involved.
Other characters provide the adrenaline that drives the plot in this masterfully narrated story. The character that grew on me is Dora Greenfield, a 21-year-old errant wife who, in her unhappy marriage, has run away, but is now compelled to return to her authoritarian husband, the art historian Dr. Paul Greenfield who is working on 14th century manuscripts that belonged to the Anglican convent. Paul is an intensely jealous man who watches his wife like a hawk. In a few pages, Murdoch painted for us a sympathetic profile of a flighty woman, not given to reflection, yet keenly aware of her husband’s contempt for her, and endearing in her scatter-brained but spontaneous responses to things that happen to her. It was a pleasure to see how Dora finds her own confidence and independence. There is Catherine Fawley, Nick’s twin sister, an angelic young woman who will soon take vows to become a nun. Beneath that fairy-like exterior churns deep psychological issues that took the reader by surprise.
But what about the bell, that carries the title of this novel? The Imber commune is looking forward to having a new bell installed and christened in the Abbey Tower. Legend has it that the old bell is accursed. It is said to be lying at the bottom of the lake. And woe betide the village whenever it rings again from the murky depths.
Murdoch wrote a prose style that is richly evocative. She created the stuffy and cloistered air at Imber court, the charm of the forests with its profusion of bird song, and the serenity and lure of the lake. So, the reader fleeing Imber Court with Dora or Toby senses the freedom that the natural world offers up as a foil to an artificially spiritual enclave.
Thematically, this is a very difficult novel to read. The Bell is about love and freedom; it is also about homosexuality and spirituality. This book was published in 1958. It is hard to fathom how incredibly painful it must be, sixty years ago, to be gay and deeply religious, not that it is necessarily easier now. Michael is fettered by his spirituality, so he is unable to love as he is inclined to, and this is what makes this story extremely sad. In his own words, ‘Spiritual power was indeed like electricity in that it was thoroughly dangerous. It could perform miracles of good: it could also bring about destruction.’
A recurring theme is truth, 'the truth-telling voice that must not be silenced.’ The tragedy in this story is the inability of several of its characters to be true to themselves and to be truthful. The consequences are severe.
The Bell is a satire on the religious life. We see in the Imber commune merely the form of organized religion; it has no substance. The ending, therefore, comes as no surprise.
There is perhaps ‘a higher and a better way’ to living a good life. I will close with the words of the Abbess to Michael, which brings me comfort at the end of this disturbing novel: ‘…we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.’
May 18, 2019
I liked this book immensely, but other readers may find it dated. It was published in 1958 and tackles through the character of Michael Meade the Church's dictum on homosexuality.
We are quickly introduced to the main theme when our hero Michael confesses to the Abbess of Imber Convent, his past involvement with Nick Fawley. The Abbess advises - there is never anything wrong with love .
Her answer, however, elides Michael's main concern which is - what about physical love, and opens the book to an exploration of this conundrum - how to express love when a particular practice is condemned by your religious beliefs?
The novel takes us - back to Michael's relationship with Nick. Michael is the teacher and Nick a student of 15 in a boys' boarding school - nothing 'unseemly' happens but Nick feels compelled to confess and tells all to the principal. Michael is dismissed.
Some 15 years later, Michael is now in charge of his own lay religious project at Imber Court, which is in fact his ancestral home - an old manor house somewhere in the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside. There are the remains of a Medieval nunnery within the grounds - Imber Abbey, which has been restored and houses an order of Benedictine nuns. The purpose of the lay community is proposed to Michael by the Abbess who feels there is a need for an intermediary group to liase between the convent and the rest of the world. At the point where our story begins this semi-religious group has been in existence for a year, run by Michael with help from a small group of his friends and acquaintances.
For me the success of this book spins on the character of Michael - if anyone asked me this question about religion and homosexuality - I would have dismissed it - as of zero interest - but because of Michael I was interested. I liked his refinement, and his sensitivity. He is portrayed as a good person wanting to lead a useful and dedicated life, but he is confounded by his essential nature and cannot reconcile it with the other half of his persona, which is his belief in God.
The character who is used, to contrast and help define Michael is James Tayper Pace an essentially straightforward religious person who works in a philanthropic way to provide schools and education for boys-in-need in London. He is taking a break at Imber Court. In contrast to Michael, however, his religious views are plodding and lacking subtlety. He is of the good and honourable kind but boring - in that he has not had to deal with intellectual or indeed religious complexities.
Murdoch naturally, doesn't say he's boring; her character development has far too much finesse.
The other question she tackles in relation to sex and religion is the one of Innocence and we have two characters who specifically embody this tradition of entering the World. Dora who is married to the awful Paul Greenfield, and Toby - filling in his summer, at Imber Court, before going up to Oxford.
I loved all the passages and chapters, which dealt primarily with Toby - here's an example.
Toby undressed quickly and went to sun himself on the sloping stones before going in. The sun warmed his flesh deeply.
First he tried lying flat on his face with his feet down the slope. But the human body is not so constructed that when in that position the neck and chin rest comfortably upon the ground. Our awkward frames deny us the relaxed pose of the recumbent dog. Convinced of this truth, Toby turned over and reclined on one elbow. In this more inviting position he was accosted by Murphy who came and laid his head against his shoulder. In a kind of physical rapture Toby sat up and took the furry beast in his arms and cuddled him as he had sometimes seen Nick do. The sensation of the hot soft living fur against his skin was strange and exciting. He sat there motionless for a while, holding the dog and looking into the lake. It was deep there by the landing-stage; and suddenly his eyes made out a large fish basking motionless where the sun penetrated the greenish water. From its narrow length and its fierce jaws he knew it to be a pike. Then his eyes began to close and only the hot sparkling of the lake pierced through the fringe of his eye-lids. He felt so happy he could almost die of it, invited by the sleep of youth when physical well-being and joy and absence of care lull the mind into a sweet coma which is the more inviting since its awakening is charmed no less, and the spirit faints briefly, almost sated with delight.
It's a long passage to quote but it gives you a good idea of the superb excellence of Murdoch's writing. Basically the whole book is encapsulated in that section above. As I wrote it, I was struck by Nick's loneliness - Yes Nick, not Toby because the dog belongs to Nick. I felt a profound stab of compassion for Nick, there, swift and sad.
Nick Fawley turns up at Imber Court, run-down, alcoholic, needing lodging, ostensibly drawn there by the presence of his sister Catherine but really seeking re-aquaintance with Michael. Michael allows him to stay at the gatekeeper's lodge, a safe distance from the main house, and this is where Toby is also ensconced.
Essentially Michael ignores Nick, preferring to retain his isolation, status and yes purity of character; and as we later find out, with disastrous consequences.
Toby - is the youthful version of Nick - full of the joys of youth and innocence. But that pike in the lake may as well be a shark - it's a symbol for all that will shatter Toby's innocence - what lies waiting for him in the wide world.
There is a plot weaving it's way through this novel, but really it is a very thinly disguised frame on which the real interest is hung - which is Micheal's rejection of his love for Nick in order to pursue what he sees as the higher good - his love for God.
He learns the significance of the old Abbess' words:
God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
Some might feel this is a compromise - they would consider physical love an essential component of love in this type of adult relationship. But there again - we are not in Michael's shoes with his need to fulfill a higher calling.
There are a couple of other stories running parallel with the main one of Michael and Nick. There is Nick's twin sister Catherine who is determined to enter the nunnery. She is esteemed and honoured by all the characters at Imber Court as the perfect example of goodness and innocence, meanwhile - her decision to enter the convent is her way of dealing with unrequited love. And the other story of interest is between Dora and Paul - essentially Dora's struggle to leave a marriage which is damaging to her sense of self. Dora is presented as another type of innocent - of the heart I think, and her story is about how she is gradually able to develop a sense of what is important to her.
So, overall - an excellent book. I read it a very long time ago, possibly when I was 18, and didn't have a clue what was going on - probably I would have been looking for the love scenes.
One final thing, the title - "The Bell", this is the action part of the book which eventually ties all the characters together into a final scene and decides the fate of the lay community. The bell in question is an old medieval bell which has been lost in Imber lake. Toby finds it, while swimming, and with Dora's help he raises it from the lake bed. Proof, of the bell's ancient heritage is confirmed by Dora, whose husband Paul, an art historian, is working on some of the Abbey documents and knows its history. On the side is carved "Vox ego sum Amoris. Gabriel vocor. I am the voice of Love. I am called Gabriel."
An author always chooses her characters' names with care: Michael is the leader of God's heavenly warriors. Because the ancient bell is named Gabriel - we remember the role of Archangel Michael - Murdoch's Michael Meade is drawn to the Crusade type pursuits of the Church and fails to see the individual suffering at his feet.
We are quickly introduced to the main theme when our hero Michael confesses to the Abbess of Imber Convent, his past involvement with Nick Fawley. The Abbess advises - there is never anything wrong with love .
Her answer, however, elides Michael's main concern which is - what about physical love, and opens the book to an exploration of this conundrum - how to express love when a particular practice is condemned by your religious beliefs?
The novel takes us - back to Michael's relationship with Nick. Michael is the teacher and Nick a student of 15 in a boys' boarding school - nothing 'unseemly' happens but Nick feels compelled to confess and tells all to the principal. Michael is dismissed.
Some 15 years later, Michael is now in charge of his own lay religious project at Imber Court, which is in fact his ancestral home - an old manor house somewhere in the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside. There are the remains of a Medieval nunnery within the grounds - Imber Abbey, which has been restored and houses an order of Benedictine nuns. The purpose of the lay community is proposed to Michael by the Abbess who feels there is a need for an intermediary group to liase between the convent and the rest of the world. At the point where our story begins this semi-religious group has been in existence for a year, run by Michael with help from a small group of his friends and acquaintances.
For me the success of this book spins on the character of Michael - if anyone asked me this question about religion and homosexuality - I would have dismissed it - as of zero interest - but because of Michael I was interested. I liked his refinement, and his sensitivity. He is portrayed as a good person wanting to lead a useful and dedicated life, but he is confounded by his essential nature and cannot reconcile it with the other half of his persona, which is his belief in God.
The character who is used, to contrast and help define Michael is James Tayper Pace an essentially straightforward religious person who works in a philanthropic way to provide schools and education for boys-in-need in London. He is taking a break at Imber Court. In contrast to Michael, however, his religious views are plodding and lacking subtlety. He is of the good and honourable kind but boring - in that he has not had to deal with intellectual or indeed religious complexities.
Murdoch naturally, doesn't say he's boring; her character development has far too much finesse.
The other question she tackles in relation to sex and religion is the one of Innocence and we have two characters who specifically embody this tradition of entering the World. Dora who is married to the awful Paul Greenfield, and Toby - filling in his summer, at Imber Court, before going up to Oxford.
I loved all the passages and chapters, which dealt primarily with Toby - here's an example.
Toby undressed quickly and went to sun himself on the sloping stones before going in. The sun warmed his flesh deeply.
First he tried lying flat on his face with his feet down the slope. But the human body is not so constructed that when in that position the neck and chin rest comfortably upon the ground. Our awkward frames deny us the relaxed pose of the recumbent dog. Convinced of this truth, Toby turned over and reclined on one elbow. In this more inviting position he was accosted by Murphy who came and laid his head against his shoulder. In a kind of physical rapture Toby sat up and took the furry beast in his arms and cuddled him as he had sometimes seen Nick do. The sensation of the hot soft living fur against his skin was strange and exciting. He sat there motionless for a while, holding the dog and looking into the lake. It was deep there by the landing-stage; and suddenly his eyes made out a large fish basking motionless where the sun penetrated the greenish water. From its narrow length and its fierce jaws he knew it to be a pike. Then his eyes began to close and only the hot sparkling of the lake pierced through the fringe of his eye-lids. He felt so happy he could almost die of it, invited by the sleep of youth when physical well-being and joy and absence of care lull the mind into a sweet coma which is the more inviting since its awakening is charmed no less, and the spirit faints briefly, almost sated with delight.
It's a long passage to quote but it gives you a good idea of the superb excellence of Murdoch's writing. Basically the whole book is encapsulated in that section above. As I wrote it, I was struck by Nick's loneliness - Yes Nick, not Toby because the dog belongs to Nick. I felt a profound stab of compassion for Nick, there, swift and sad.
Nick Fawley turns up at Imber Court, run-down, alcoholic, needing lodging, ostensibly drawn there by the presence of his sister Catherine but really seeking re-aquaintance with Michael. Michael allows him to stay at the gatekeeper's lodge, a safe distance from the main house, and this is where Toby is also ensconced.
Essentially Michael ignores Nick, preferring to retain his isolation, status and yes purity of character; and as we later find out, with disastrous consequences.
Toby - is the youthful version of Nick - full of the joys of youth and innocence. But that pike in the lake may as well be a shark - it's a symbol for all that will shatter Toby's innocence - what lies waiting for him in the wide world.
There is a plot weaving it's way through this novel, but really it is a very thinly disguised frame on which the real interest is hung - which is Micheal's rejection of his love for Nick in order to pursue what he sees as the higher good - his love for God.
He learns the significance of the old Abbess' words:
God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
Some might feel this is a compromise - they would consider physical love an essential component of love in this type of adult relationship. But there again - we are not in Michael's shoes with his need to fulfill a higher calling.
There are a couple of other stories running parallel with the main one of Michael and Nick. There is Nick's twin sister Catherine who is determined to enter the nunnery. She is esteemed and honoured by all the characters at Imber Court as the perfect example of goodness and innocence, meanwhile - her decision to enter the convent is her way of dealing with unrequited love. And the other story of interest is between Dora and Paul - essentially Dora's struggle to leave a marriage which is damaging to her sense of self. Dora is presented as another type of innocent - of the heart I think, and her story is about how she is gradually able to develop a sense of what is important to her.
So, overall - an excellent book. I read it a very long time ago, possibly when I was 18, and didn't have a clue what was going on - probably I would have been looking for the love scenes.
One final thing, the title - "The Bell", this is the action part of the book which eventually ties all the characters together into a final scene and decides the fate of the lay community. The bell in question is an old medieval bell which has been lost in Imber lake. Toby finds it, while swimming, and with Dora's help he raises it from the lake bed. Proof, of the bell's ancient heritage is confirmed by Dora, whose husband Paul, an art historian, is working on some of the Abbey documents and knows its history. On the side is carved "Vox ego sum Amoris. Gabriel vocor. I am the voice of Love. I am called Gabriel."
An author always chooses her characters' names with care: Michael is the leader of God's heavenly warriors. Because the ancient bell is named Gabriel - we remember the role of Archangel Michael - Murdoch's Michael Meade is drawn to the Crusade type pursuits of the Church and fails to see the individual suffering at his feet.
August 18, 2020
4,5* Como é que só li Iris Murdoch agora? Este é um livro notável, de uma autora genial. Achei sublime o modo como se desenrola o frágil e emaranhado novelo de questões morais e éticas, expondo os personagens nas suas múltiplas vertentes. A homossexualidade, a religião e o casamento são alguns dos temas que dominam esta obra, na qual o sino Gabriel ocupa um lugar decisivo. Estive agarrada até à última página.
( Só achei exagerada a quantidade de descrições dos locais, demasiado minuciosa para o meu gosto)
( Só achei exagerada a quantidade de descrições dos locais, demasiado minuciosa para o meu gosto)
August 25, 2019
This book is dubbed Murdoch’s first “English novel,” given that it is set in the heart of the English countryside and within a large estate that houses the self-supporting lay community of Imber Court that in turn encircles an Anglican nunnery (the Abbey). The Court and Abbey have an additional separation by an artificial lake in between them. The transition from outside world to the Court and then to the Abbey is symbolic of a progressive journey deeper into the spiritual life, and only the beautiful and neurotic Catherine is expected to make the complete journey through all three zones. The conceit of a group of people voluntarily cut away from the world and wrestling with their human frailties and moral dilemmas is ripe with conflicts that normal lay people may never encounter.
Conflict from the outside world comes to Imber Court in the way of Dora, a transgressive housewife, who has no intention for, or concept of, the moral life, who has left her academic, bullying, and control-freak husband, Paul, only to return to him because she knows that she may just end up in another affair by being on the loose. Paul is living at the Court and working at the Abbey on some 14th century manuscripts. A host of other characters populate the Court, and Murdoch displays some amateurish novel writing when she introduces them like a reception line-up:
‘This is Peter Topglass,’ said Mrs Mark. A tall baldish man with spectacles swayed in a bow to Dora. ‘And this is Michael Meade, our leader.’ A long-nosed man with pale floppy brown hair and blue eyes set too close together smiled a rather tired and anxious smile. ‘And this is Mark Strafford (Mrs. Marks' husband), with the beaver.’ A large man with bushy hair and a ginger beard and a slightly sarcastic expression came forward to nod to Dora. He smelt strongly of disinfectant. ‘And this is Patchway, who is a tower of strength to us in the market-garden.’ A dirty-looking man with a decrepit hat on, who looked as if he did not belong and was indifferent to not belonging, gazed morosely at Dora. ‘And this is Father Bob Joyce, our Father Confessor.’ The cassocked priest who had just come into the room bustled up to shake Dora’s hand.
Rounding the cast of characters are deputy head James Tayper Pace, who shares a different philosophy than Michael, and budding Oxford student Toby Gashe who has come to Imber to get a dose of the spiritual life. The villain of the piece is Nick, Catherine’s twin brother, mercurial and alcoholic, who had a homosexual affair with Michael fourteen years ago and railroaded the leader’s plan to become a priest by ratting on him. And yet, many of these characters come across as caricatures, casting only their positional markers on the page. It is with the three POV characters, Dora, Michael and Toby, that we get to plumb at a deeper level of motivation and moral conjecturing.
There is an element of magic and superstition in the novel, which seems to dog Murdoch’s works, not forgetting the obvious moral philosophizing that goes on ad nauseum. The superstition is bound up with the curse of the old bell that is supposed to have toppled off its tower in the Abbey and sunk into the lake when a nun transgressed and took a lover. Disturbing the old bell from its watery grave is supposed to cause a death in the community. The old bell is therefore to be replaced with new one in a consecration ceremony conducted by the Bishop, after which the replacement would be rolled over the causeway from Court to Abbey, just like a new nun would enter the cloister, just like Catherine is due to do shortly. But Dora, who has spent most of her life in small flats and rooms, is getting bored with the ordered life at Imber Court, and having discovered the location of the submerged bell, conspires with her willing acolyte and love-struck Toby to switch bells and perform a miracle just to spice up the dull old place. The bell serves as both a metaphor for buried secrets that are best left alone and as a catalyst for a series of farcical incidents that trigger the simmering tensions within the residents of Imber Court and bring them to the boil, spelling the end for this fragile community. In fact, metaphors abound; the reader is left to puzzle over the butterfly in the train carriage, the lost luggage, the lost shoes, and the causeway among others. The tensions are mainly of a sexual nature, or more pointedly, occur where sex conflicts with morality. Even though the sex amounts to nothing more than hand-holding, cuddling and kissing, the implications of those actions to this community that seems to have renounced the world and bound itself by conventional roles, is staggering.
The philosophy is worth mentioning. James Tayper Pace is a traditionalist and believes in innocence over experience: “obey the rules.” Michael, battling with his homosexuality, believes in knowing one’s capabilities (and fallibilities) and in not over-reaching them. Nick believes that a good man should recognize sin in himself and in others and be prepared to confess. It is the Abbess who has the most profound insight: ‘We can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.’ I suspect that Murdoch was expressing her viewpoint through the Abbess.
This a very “told” novel in the firm hands of Murdoch. I had difficulty trying to figure out how “a narrow stare of anxious suspicion” could be shown. Words like “rebarbative” occur frequently. And we are left with a lot of loose ends, as the community dissolves and disperses. We never know who sabotaged the causeway, we never know whether Dora will ever get back with Paul, or whether, as she suspects, Michael will marry Catherine and have lots of kids. I believe that Murdoch was more interested in creating situations where moral dilemmas could be brought into focus and examined rather than in writing a novel where every loose thread is knotted in a bow, and where everyone lives happily ever after—in fact, except for the nuns in the cloister who come across as the most balanced, no one does. They all seem to disperse from Imber Court with a heavy bell of secrets tied around their necks.
Conflict from the outside world comes to Imber Court in the way of Dora, a transgressive housewife, who has no intention for, or concept of, the moral life, who has left her academic, bullying, and control-freak husband, Paul, only to return to him because she knows that she may just end up in another affair by being on the loose. Paul is living at the Court and working at the Abbey on some 14th century manuscripts. A host of other characters populate the Court, and Murdoch displays some amateurish novel writing when she introduces them like a reception line-up:
‘This is Peter Topglass,’ said Mrs Mark. A tall baldish man with spectacles swayed in a bow to Dora. ‘And this is Michael Meade, our leader.’ A long-nosed man with pale floppy brown hair and blue eyes set too close together smiled a rather tired and anxious smile. ‘And this is Mark Strafford (Mrs. Marks' husband), with the beaver.’ A large man with bushy hair and a ginger beard and a slightly sarcastic expression came forward to nod to Dora. He smelt strongly of disinfectant. ‘And this is Patchway, who is a tower of strength to us in the market-garden.’ A dirty-looking man with a decrepit hat on, who looked as if he did not belong and was indifferent to not belonging, gazed morosely at Dora. ‘And this is Father Bob Joyce, our Father Confessor.’ The cassocked priest who had just come into the room bustled up to shake Dora’s hand.
Rounding the cast of characters are deputy head James Tayper Pace, who shares a different philosophy than Michael, and budding Oxford student Toby Gashe who has come to Imber to get a dose of the spiritual life. The villain of the piece is Nick, Catherine’s twin brother, mercurial and alcoholic, who had a homosexual affair with Michael fourteen years ago and railroaded the leader’s plan to become a priest by ratting on him. And yet, many of these characters come across as caricatures, casting only their positional markers on the page. It is with the three POV characters, Dora, Michael and Toby, that we get to plumb at a deeper level of motivation and moral conjecturing.
There is an element of magic and superstition in the novel, which seems to dog Murdoch’s works, not forgetting the obvious moral philosophizing that goes on ad nauseum. The superstition is bound up with the curse of the old bell that is supposed to have toppled off its tower in the Abbey and sunk into the lake when a nun transgressed and took a lover. Disturbing the old bell from its watery grave is supposed to cause a death in the community. The old bell is therefore to be replaced with new one in a consecration ceremony conducted by the Bishop, after which the replacement would be rolled over the causeway from Court to Abbey, just like a new nun would enter the cloister, just like Catherine is due to do shortly. But Dora, who has spent most of her life in small flats and rooms, is getting bored with the ordered life at Imber Court, and having discovered the location of the submerged bell, conspires with her willing acolyte and love-struck Toby to switch bells and perform a miracle just to spice up the dull old place. The bell serves as both a metaphor for buried secrets that are best left alone and as a catalyst for a series of farcical incidents that trigger the simmering tensions within the residents of Imber Court and bring them to the boil, spelling the end for this fragile community. In fact, metaphors abound; the reader is left to puzzle over the butterfly in the train carriage, the lost luggage, the lost shoes, and the causeway among others. The tensions are mainly of a sexual nature, or more pointedly, occur where sex conflicts with morality. Even though the sex amounts to nothing more than hand-holding, cuddling and kissing, the implications of those actions to this community that seems to have renounced the world and bound itself by conventional roles, is staggering.
The philosophy is worth mentioning. James Tayper Pace is a traditionalist and believes in innocence over experience: “obey the rules.” Michael, battling with his homosexuality, believes in knowing one’s capabilities (and fallibilities) and in not over-reaching them. Nick believes that a good man should recognize sin in himself and in others and be prepared to confess. It is the Abbess who has the most profound insight: ‘We can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.’ I suspect that Murdoch was expressing her viewpoint through the Abbess.
This a very “told” novel in the firm hands of Murdoch. I had difficulty trying to figure out how “a narrow stare of anxious suspicion” could be shown. Words like “rebarbative” occur frequently. And we are left with a lot of loose ends, as the community dissolves and disperses. We never know who sabotaged the causeway, we never know whether Dora will ever get back with Paul, or whether, as she suspects, Michael will marry Catherine and have lots of kids. I believe that Murdoch was more interested in creating situations where moral dilemmas could be brought into focus and examined rather than in writing a novel where every loose thread is knotted in a bow, and where everyone lives happily ever after—in fact, except for the nuns in the cloister who come across as the most balanced, no one does. They all seem to disperse from Imber Court with a heavy bell of secrets tied around their necks.
February 17, 2020
The Bell of the Unquenchable Self
I don't usually find a full and distinct voice in the books of acclaimed female writers. Blessed with luck, I encountered Iris Murdoch. Ms. Murdoch's writing style is clean and simple, and she is able to make complicated plot easy to follow. The content is not intentionally dense and the language not splendid, but she fascinates me with the eccentric and messy personalities that she portrays; gradually, I find myself full of solicitude for those fictional characters in her literary world.
I find out that Ms. Murdoch, besides being a novelist, is also a philosopher, and I start to think of her literature as an imaginative humanization of abstract philosophy. I haven't read any of her philosophy but I get some idea from the title of one of Ms. Murdoch's most famous philosophical work which is Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. The setting of The Bell, Imber Court (an Anglican lay religious community), constitutes a metaphysical system and the characters are moral persons interpreting and interacting within this metaphysical system. Metaphysics don't transcend the morals but instead serve as a mere guide for morals, and it is up to the independent moral person to construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the metaphysical reality.
The submission of the self to a transcendent metaphysical system is embodied by the character James who believes: "The chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself." The novel as a whole then completely shatters the viability of this vision. The self is like a bell: "A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung. It rings out clearly, it bears witness, it cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons. A great bell is not to be silenced. Consider too its simplicity. There is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open." Even when sunk in the deep lake, the bell sends out ripples and causes emotional turmoil. There is one unique self for each individual, but from the self springs conflicting elements: in the case of Michael, both religious belief and passionate love. Rigid religious belief submits the moral self to the metaphysics, but passionate love in some sense submits the moral self to the independent moral self of another. Both can be utterly destructive. For Michael, he finally submits to love and disregards the metaphysics of religion: "He put it to himself: there is a God, but I do not believe in Him." But tragically for him, the love he submits to is a hopeless one.
The Bell is quite like a modern version of The Magic Mountain without difficult philosophical dialogues. Every character is highly intriguing (I especially find Michael, Noel, Nick, and Catherine fascinating). Ms. Murdoch lulls me into her fictional minds and I can find myself through the voices she utter. This is the first Murdoch novel for me, but I can foresee that in the future she might very likely replace Virginia Woolf as my favorite female writer.
I don't usually find a full and distinct voice in the books of acclaimed female writers. Blessed with luck, I encountered Iris Murdoch. Ms. Murdoch's writing style is clean and simple, and she is able to make complicated plot easy to follow. The content is not intentionally dense and the language not splendid, but she fascinates me with the eccentric and messy personalities that she portrays; gradually, I find myself full of solicitude for those fictional characters in her literary world.
I find out that Ms. Murdoch, besides being a novelist, is also a philosopher, and I start to think of her literature as an imaginative humanization of abstract philosophy. I haven't read any of her philosophy but I get some idea from the title of one of Ms. Murdoch's most famous philosophical work which is Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. The setting of The Bell, Imber Court (an Anglican lay religious community), constitutes a metaphysical system and the characters are moral persons interpreting and interacting within this metaphysical system. Metaphysics don't transcend the morals but instead serve as a mere guide for morals, and it is up to the independent moral person to construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the metaphysical reality.
The submission of the self to a transcendent metaphysical system is embodied by the character James who believes: "The chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself." The novel as a whole then completely shatters the viability of this vision. The self is like a bell: "A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung. It rings out clearly, it bears witness, it cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons. A great bell is not to be silenced. Consider too its simplicity. There is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open." Even when sunk in the deep lake, the bell sends out ripples and causes emotional turmoil. There is one unique self for each individual, but from the self springs conflicting elements: in the case of Michael, both religious belief and passionate love. Rigid religious belief submits the moral self to the metaphysics, but passionate love in some sense submits the moral self to the independent moral self of another. Both can be utterly destructive. For Michael, he finally submits to love and disregards the metaphysics of religion: "He put it to himself: there is a God, but I do not believe in Him." But tragically for him, the love he submits to is a hopeless one.
The Bell is quite like a modern version of The Magic Mountain without difficult philosophical dialogues. Every character is highly intriguing (I especially find Michael, Noel, Nick, and Catherine fascinating). Ms. Murdoch lulls me into her fictional minds and I can find myself through the voices she utter. This is the first Murdoch novel for me, but I can foresee that in the future she might very likely replace Virginia Woolf as my favorite female writer.
December 20, 2015
... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it.
In 1950s England it was illegal to be homosexual. In this novel it’s 1950s England and Michael is homosexual. He’s created a mysterious religious community nestled away in the secluded woods which also serves as storage space for his desires. But you really can’t hide from who you are, can you? And Dora, a young woman unhappily married to an older man, also starts to figure out that this kind of repression isn’t sustainable.
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and in others, are usually disappointed.
Love. There was a scene of absolute beauty where two people talk for hours as it turns to night and neither has noticed the room is suddenly dark. Where does that early love go? When does one cross the line from loving someone to possessing them? If only it would last...
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued.
There’s an overwhelming sense of dread building and when it comes it’s hardly surprising; people weren’t meant to be shut-in. Redemption comes clumsily, if at all.
This was my first Murdoch novel and I was impressed by the simultaneous torment and wit of her writing.
In 1950s England it was illegal to be homosexual. In this novel it’s 1950s England and Michael is homosexual. He’s created a mysterious religious community nestled away in the secluded woods which also serves as storage space for his desires. But you really can’t hide from who you are, can you? And Dora, a young woman unhappily married to an older man, also starts to figure out that this kind of repression isn’t sustainable.
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and in others, are usually disappointed.
Love. There was a scene of absolute beauty where two people talk for hours as it turns to night and neither has noticed the room is suddenly dark. Where does that early love go? When does one cross the line from loving someone to possessing them? If only it would last...
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued.
There’s an overwhelming sense of dread building and when it comes it’s hardly surprising; people weren’t meant to be shut-in. Redemption comes clumsily, if at all.
This was my first Murdoch novel and I was impressed by the simultaneous torment and wit of her writing.
March 3, 2022
Iris Murdoch was once profiled as having a very intellectual temperament, a challenging nature, a deeply analytical bent, a Marxist philosophy, an existentialist approach to life and someone marked by a great generosity of mind & spirit. She was also described as being "very striking & determined, like an emancipated character in an Aldous Huxley novel."
The Bell is a meandering tale encapsulating a group of people in search of something "spiritual" if not precisely theologically-based, as well as being in search of themselves. They have rather informally clustered together at a Palladian estate called "Imber Court", within the grounds an adjacent former Benedictine monastic community of monks, now a monastery for cloistered women, presided over by an Abbess.
These lay people are said to be "sick people who can neither live in nor out of the world" and who are "haunted by God." It is commented that every pilgrimage involves a purification of desire & in The Bell there is a quest by some residents for goodness & love rather than for God.
Michael Meade, a shy, chaste homosexual, failed schoolmaster & heir of the Imber Court estate is nominally the head of this collective of motley souls, each with a different level of motivation for bonding together but with Michael providing lodgings for the group. He is Cambridge educated, a confirmed believer & an ex-company commander with a local regiment. It was he who had a vision to create this commune...
Another character, Dora is flighty & forgets her luggage on the train, also feeling socially inferior to the others. Catherine is a highly-strung vegetarian, spiritually questing & considering becoming a nun. Toby Gashe is a young Oxford-bound lad who finds time to make love to Dora before abruptly departing. Paul Greenfield is a Cambridge man & a snob, researching rare manuscripts at Imber while married to & very controlling of Dora, 12 years younger.
Beyond that, let's save room for "The Bell" itself in this cast of characters, standing as a symbol of male/female, arousing spirituality in some where love of man & love of God flow together. Alas, the old bell has been missing for ages & a new one on order, representing an attempt to regenerate the community at large, providing a link between the age of faith & miracles and a modern, more secular time.
In time, one or more of the group does become transformed, while others drift away or just linger for lack of alternatives. Michael retains a hold over his community, giving Sunday sermons, including one where he intones:
The old & missing bell, inscribed Ego Vox Amoris Sum (I am the Voice of Love) does make a guest appearance but I hesitate to provide details here, for fear of spoiling one of the book's more encompassing features for a potential reader.
Iris Murdoch's The Bell was written 60 years ago. Her world was quite definitely different than ours in many respects. However, the book contains language I found uplifting & an odd assembly of quirky characters striving for meaning that I found quite memorable. This was my first encounter with Murdoch but definitely aroused my interest in reading other works by the author, including The Sea, The Sea.
*There is an excellent biography of Iris Murdoch by Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life.
**Photo images within my review are of the author, Iris Murdoch, at various points in her life.
The Bell is a meandering tale encapsulating a group of people in search of something "spiritual" if not precisely theologically-based, as well as being in search of themselves. They have rather informally clustered together at a Palladian estate called "Imber Court", within the grounds an adjacent former Benedictine monastic community of monks, now a monastery for cloistered women, presided over by an Abbess.
These lay people are said to be "sick people who can neither live in nor out of the world" and who are "haunted by God." It is commented that every pilgrimage involves a purification of desire & in The Bell there is a quest by some residents for goodness & love rather than for God.
Michael Meade, a shy, chaste homosexual, failed schoolmaster & heir of the Imber Court estate is nominally the head of this collective of motley souls, each with a different level of motivation for bonding together but with Michael providing lodgings for the group. He is Cambridge educated, a confirmed believer & an ex-company commander with a local regiment. It was he who had a vision to create this commune...
The Imber Court community in its present form had existed for just under a year, with its beginnings having been casual & its future uncertain. Michael was attracted to the place but had never lived there, it having been used for government offices & then remaining empty.Among the cast of characters at Imber are Peter Topglass, Michael's old friend from university, pious & a naturalist. There is also James, who aspired to be a missionary but settled into community work & after suffering a nervous breakdown, longs to move to the country for hoped-for rehabilitation. He has rather rigid views & often quotes from the Bible.
It now seemed to him that the grounds were sacred, presently open to him to make decisive changes in his life, somehow working in tandem with the Abbey, being very anxious to make acquaintance with the Benedictine community, of whose holiness he had heard so much. His encounter with the Abbess changed his life.
Another character, Dora is flighty & forgets her luggage on the train, also feeling socially inferior to the others. Catherine is a highly-strung vegetarian, spiritually questing & considering becoming a nun. Toby Gashe is a young Oxford-bound lad who finds time to make love to Dora before abruptly departing. Paul Greenfield is a Cambridge man & a snob, researching rare manuscripts at Imber while married to & very controlling of Dora, 12 years younger.
Beyond that, let's save room for "The Bell" itself in this cast of characters, standing as a symbol of male/female, arousing spirituality in some where love of man & love of God flow together. Alas, the old bell has been missing for ages & a new one on order, representing an attempt to regenerate the community at large, providing a link between the age of faith & miracles and a modern, more secular time.
In time, one or more of the group does become transformed, while others drift away or just linger for lack of alternatives. Michael retains a hold over his community, giving Sunday sermons, including one where he intones:
It is the positive thing that saves. Can we doubt that God requires of us that we know ourselves? Remember the parable of the talents, different propensities, many of them capable of good or evil use. We must endeavor to know our possibilities & use what energy we really possess in doing God's will.
As spiritual beings, in our imperfection & also in the possibility of our perfection, we differ profoundly from one another. Each of us will have his own way of apprehending God. God speaks to us in various tongues. To this, we must be attentive.
The old & missing bell, inscribed Ego Vox Amoris Sum (I am the Voice of Love) does make a guest appearance but I hesitate to provide details here, for fear of spoiling one of the book's more encompassing features for a potential reader.
Iris Murdoch's The Bell was written 60 years ago. Her world was quite definitely different than ours in many respects. However, the book contains language I found uplifting & an odd assembly of quirky characters striving for meaning that I found quite memorable. This was my first encounter with Murdoch but definitely aroused my interest in reading other works by the author, including The Sea, The Sea.
*There is an excellent biography of Iris Murdoch by Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life.
**Photo images within my review are of the author, Iris Murdoch, at various points in her life.
August 7, 2019
I’ve been very eager to read more by Iris Murdoch since this year marks the centenary of her birth. I’ve read a few of her novels in the past and probably “The Sea, The Sea” is my favourite. It’s a nice coincidence that I read “The Bell” after “The Blithedale Romance” because they both involve stories about the formation of intentional communities. While I was frustrated with the limited perspective Hawthorne gave of the organization and social challenges involved in creating and running such a community, “The Bell” showed more about this in its depiction of the workings of a lay religious community which exists directly alongside an enclosed nunnery. The interpersonal dramas of the community members provide an intriguing and sometimes ironic counterpoint to the hidden, unknown workings of the nuns who exist in a state of presumed harmony within their shielded religious devotion.
Read my full review of The Bell by Iris Murdoch on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of The Bell by Iris Murdoch on LonesomeReader
April 29, 2019
A sense of ennui prevails and clouds over The Bell despite its seemingly unshakeable spiritual sentiments. Murdoch's lucid prose baffles, tempts then almost seduces innocence to destroy itself at the surge of forbidden desire. She makes independence toil to discover its own worth against the deceitful freedom that both religion and marriage can promise; caging instead of emancipating. A friction between a "calling" and a "passion". The Bell resounds at a distance — hauntingly and tearfully. It drowns in its subtle dissonance almost to a dying shrill before pushing itself up for air; gasping. Then it resounds, faintly, rings, cautiously of hope, in time. And this takes time. However burdening guilt, regret, grief, and rejection may be, there is a place somewhere for everyone not only to nurse but also to heal. People also break each other's hearts in this compelling tale of brooding faith and disbelief. They break even their own. Though none of Murdoch's characters are completely likeable, they manoeuvre in a reality glaringly familiar with all of us: the struggle with knowing and accepting one's flawed self; and most powerful: the forgiveness of mistakes, the unalterable past, and our ever changing selves. Sometimes you have to put and think of yourself first.
"With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes a consolation in the end."
A delightful, effectual read amidst its little spells of tragedy.
"With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes a consolation in the end."
A delightful, effectual read amidst its little spells of tragedy.
August 10, 2024
سرد فلسفي رائع وشخصيات روائية غنية بالتعقيدات والمعضلات الشخصية لمجموعة من الأشخاص يكّونون جماعة أو طائفة دينية تابعة لمذهب للكنيسة الأنجليكانية الإنجليزية. اتخذت دير معزول في منطقة جلوسترشاير الريفية في منزل كبير يملكه أحد مؤسسي الجماعة "مايكل ميد"، يعيشون في جو روحاني معزول عن العالم الدنيوي المادي مع الاعتماد على أنفسهم في الزراعة وصنع متطلباتهم المعيشية المتقشفة، وفصل أنفسهم عن العالم الخارجي مع ممارسة شعائرهم الدينية.
نرى مجموعة ينضم لها بشكل مؤقت عالم أثري لدراسة بعض المخطوطات في الدير وزوجته "دورا جرينفيلد" الغير متدينة ومشاكلها الزوجية، "مايكل ميد" ومعضلته المتمثلة في المثلية الجنسية والمتعارضة مع كونه رجل دين وتحريم الكنيسة، "جيمس" صديق مايكل ومن المؤسسين وله نظرته الخاصة، "كاثرين" الفتاة المعدة للرهبنة واضطرابها العقلي، وأمثلة أخرى من مجتمعم المغلق، وهم في انتظار تعليق جرس جديد للكنيسة في الدير خلال أيام.
يصر جيمس على تحقيق الكمال والتقيد بالصرامة الأخلاقية المطلقة، بينما يرى مايكل أن الإنسان ضعيف ويجب إعطائه الفرصة للفضيلة والرجوع إلى الطريق القويم.
"إن القلب البشري يتوصل إلى العثور على بعض الراحة وكأنه مدفوع بقوة مغناطيسية، ونوبات الندم نفسها تخفّ مع الزمن".
بنية الرواية متينة وتتميز بثراء الشخصيات والحبكة والنظرة الفلسفية للكاتبة في مجتمع متباين، وكل شىء وضده في سرد متناسق جلي، يمثل نقد ورؤية فلسفية تحليلية من الكاتبة لكلا الطرفين؛ مجتمعهم الذي يمثل الأخلاق والمواعظ مع نوازع داخلية مؤثرة في تصرفاتهم، والعالم الخارجي الصاخب المنوع بكل الأشكال. وهل تستمر تلك الطائفة حتى النهاية؟
"فالندم معناه التفكير في الخطيئة من دون السعي إلى تحويل هذه الفكرة إلى عزاء".
نرى مجموعة ينضم لها بشكل مؤقت عالم أثري لدراسة بعض المخطوطات في الدير وزوجته "دورا جرينفيلد" الغير متدينة ومشاكلها الزوجية، "مايكل ميد" ومعضلته المتمثلة في المثلية الجنسية والمتعارضة مع كونه رجل دين وتحريم الكنيسة، "جيمس" صديق مايكل ومن المؤسسين وله نظرته الخاصة، "كاثرين" الفتاة المعدة للرهبنة واضطرابها العقلي، وأمثلة أخرى من مجتمعم المغلق، وهم في انتظار تعليق جرس جديد للكنيسة في الدير خلال أيام.
يصر جيمس على تحقيق الكمال والتقيد بالصرامة الأخلاقية المطلقة، بينما يرى مايكل أن الإنسان ضعيف ويجب إعطائه الفرصة للفضيلة والرجوع إلى الطريق القويم.
"إن القلب البشري يتوصل إلى العثور على بعض الراحة وكأنه مدفوع بقوة مغناطيسية، ونوبات الندم نفسها تخفّ مع الزمن".
بنية الرواية متينة وتتميز بثراء الشخصيات والحبكة والنظرة الفلسفية للكاتبة في مجتمع متباين، وكل شىء وضده في سرد متناسق جلي، يمثل نقد ورؤية فلسفية تحليلية من الكاتبة لكلا الطرفين؛ مجتمعهم الذي يمثل الأخلاق والمواعظ مع نوازع داخلية مؤثرة في تصرفاتهم، والعالم الخارجي الصاخب المنوع بكل الأشكال. وهل تستمر تلك الطائفة حتى النهاية؟
"فالندم معناه التفكير في الخطيئة من دون السعي إلى تحويل هذه الفكرة إلى عزاء".
April 22, 2018
Several characters come to a lay community attached to a Benedictine nunnery. It is a place of sanctuary, a bridge between the secular world outside and the closed, contemplative, spiritual convent. Most of the characters are looking for some kind of peace, although not all of them find it.
This novel is widely regarded as Murdoch's masterpiece. I have not read all of her books, but this one is excellent.
I read this again with a book group. We had an interesting discussion about the book, so instead of adding to my review, I will link to it:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
This novel is widely regarded as Murdoch's masterpiece. I have not read all of her books, but this one is excellent.
I read this again with a book group. We had an interesting discussion about the book, so instead of adding to my review, I will link to it:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
November 12, 2017
Religious community life: tension, spirituality, suppressed sexuality, practicality. Less overtly philosophical than Under the Net.
The Guardian selected it as a book to give you hope:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
The Guardian selected it as a book to give you hope:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
December 14, 2013
this book is so good. so so good. it is one of those books of which i ask myself, how did she do it? how did she come up with a story like this? what tremendous formal control does it take to write such a seemingly simple story and pack it with so much stuff?
the beginning is a bit Middlemarchian, in that a rather naive girl marries an older man who is passionate about his scholarship (we never learn whether his scholarship is any good) and also tremendously narcissistic, manipulative, and abusive.
maybe this is self-conscious because the young woman is called dora (Middlemarch, dorothea) -- but then again dora is such a fraught name in 20th century literature.
murdoch wrote this in 1958 but it could well have been written yesterday. scared of her husband, dora leaves. this is the first line of the novel: "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him." i think it should be among those great beginnings that get listed occasionally in some venue or other.
while away from her husband, dora frolics sexually with another guy, a hippy-ish kind of guy who is both a lover and a buddy and asks nothing of dora. which leads dora right back into paul's arm.
so here's the first theme of this novel – the grip that narcissistic, manipulative, abusive men have on women. i know a couple of those personally. i testify that it is true. but, and i'm jumping ahead, these narcissistic manipulative abusive men also have the entire world on their side: their wives who don't understand them; they abandon them and hurt them; because they are so nice; so sweet; so defenseless. narcissistic manipulative abusive men have the world wrapped around their fingers, because the world is a constellation of countless planets that rotate around the suns of narcissistic manipulative abusive men.
the tentative, delicate, ambivalent evolution of paul and dora's relationship is one of the delights of this novel.
the story takes place in a lay religious community attached to a nuns' monastery (anglican benedictine) where paul goes to do research on ancient manuscripts. the nuns are cloistered but one can ask for audiences and mass is said every day at the monastery that outsiders can attend, though the design of the chapel is such that the nuns are invisible to the outsiders. dora, imprisoned in her own dreadful marriage, is horrified by the nuns' self-imposed exile and fails to see, at least at first, that they are in fact quite free and fulfilled.
the lay community is a thing of beauty. it is led by a most captivating character, a gay man with a mixed past in which sexual trouble and a strong vocation to the priesthood battle each other. the community is situated in a large country mansion, run down but still beautiful, architecturally connected to the monastery, and edged by a lake. there are bridges and boats and one cannot really get out of there without using one or the other. there is also a small town one can reach on foot.
the small lay community is only one year old and populated by a motley crew of idiosyncratic folks, about 10 in all. there are two leaders: michael, the real leader – a reluctant one – and james, his second in command, a man less sympathetic than our friend michael. james is a man of certainties. michael is anything but. but james means well and they all mean well and they are trying hard and deeply believe in what they are doing. they work the earth, grow their own food, have meetings, pray, share meals in silence, and enjoy the quiet and comtemplativity of their lives.
the crux of the novel, it seems to me, is that religious afflatus is inevitably erotic, and this eroticism needs to go somewhere. people who are celibate by religious choice work on it all of their lives and when they work on it well (the nuns in the novel are a really good example here) they get to be lovely human beings with a purity, simplicity, youthfulness and joy that is quite beguiling. i do not actually believe that all of this comes from chastity itself. lots of married folks with the same qualities. i believe it comes to the giving of one’s life, freely, to the spirit, radically, in a way that isn’t driven by neurosis or bitterness or repression but true calling) the negotiation of the cravings of the body and the cravings of the soul in the name of love can mold people into a sort of perennial youthfulness.
i love the way in which murdoch delves deeply inside the members of the lay community’s fumblings with their exalted religiosity and their inevitably exalted eroticism (don't take my word for it; read the writings of the saints). male homosexuality is front and center here, and murdoch deals with it in a way that i found very modern. there is some inner torture in the characters, but none of it is endorsed by the author and the most balanced among them are really quite fine. in other words, this is not Giovanni's Room, which was published only two years earlier (this may have something to do with the fact that murdoch was not a gay man, though she certainly was a woman-loving woman).
towards the end things move fast and there is also a great deal of set-piece comedy, until the comedy goes away and things go back to being serious. but the book never stops being warm, and affirming, and hopeful, and if you are a religious person, or a person interested in religion, and maybe also a queer person, you will find murdoch's dealing with all this simply mind-blowing.
April 7, 2013
There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.
The voice of the Abbess comes from behind a holy grille. Designated as such, if you can believe. Believe she knows your heart. You cannot see hers. If you can believe her as a church to walk inside of what you can live with. Behind walls, a locked door, out of confinement and patience. Perhaps from all of the time in the world. But if you touched your hand to the bars in a prison love scene would you suffocate from claustrophobic air? Mouth to mouth to know your heart. I couldn't believe. I was fascinated. There were ideas for her to suggest and no one to live with them.
A young woman in Michael's religious community received her sign from God to take her own vows and enter into confinement. I believe her because she says so. It's a secret, a dreaded promise.
The signs on the bottom of the cereal bowl point to a good night's sleep. Their religion is material of I will know it when I see it to shield I will deny it when it makes me alive. An ill omen, it was in the cards, how did I think I would get away with it in the end? Iris Murdoch was my nun hiding cheat kings and queens under her robes. She held every piece in her hand and never lets go.
When the secret behind the knowing burns through the material The Bell is hot and real, a secret to be spied upon, dirt under the rug and real living. If the book was like when Michael walks upon the nun-to-be Catherine. Her skirt up to past her thighs. She's sitting with her brother, Michael's one time hoped for secret in the dirt rug dark. It belongs to her, the past they are gaining for a last reprieve before she never sees Nick again. Murdoch didn't have to tell me the shock, what the look away retina scarred intimacy meant. Michael afraid to look, Michael living on second and third thoughts of closeted homosexuality. Catherine's bent head looking like her brother, but not her brother. She reminds him of him. She's not him. Did he tell her about what happened when Michael was his teacher, in a past life made up of different signs pointing in the wrong direction? Of course he told her. He tells her everything. Murdoch tells me all of it. I am sitting outside the life. I can look but I cannot touch. This belongs to Catherine, though. I didn't have to be told what it meant. I wish the whole book was like that scene.
'And what are the marks of innocence? Candour- a beautiful word - truthfulness, simplicity, a quite involuntary bearing of witness. The image that occurs to me here is a topical one, the image of a bell. A bell is made to speak out. What would be the value of a bell which was never rung? It rings out clearly, it bears witness, it cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons. A great bell is not silenced. Consider too its simplicity. There is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open; and if it is moved it must ring.
Nick's suicide, Catherine's schizophrenia. Did Nick live as himself when no one was around to watch him? The tree felled in the woods. Murdoch would tell you what it sounded like. No secrets. Off-stage and it's not a life. It's not a story. I never knew Nick. He exists as a sign of something around Michael's neck. Catherine's romantic love for Michael. Michael's look away lust for the young Toby. Nick confront's Toby. Please leave Nick. Please leave Catherine. Michael has second, third, fourth and fifth thoughts. I could think for him. Murdoch tells you what the next thought is before he's had it.
The introduction for the Penguin classics edition said something about Murdoch's aim for the story to work for the perspective of every character. It isn't a story, though. It's the suggestion of a story. The frivolous Dora who cannot live with or without her husband, the controlling and dour Paul who loves her against his will. I don't know that he loves her. I know that he says he loves her and it is against what he would want for himself. He wears a serious expression and holds an important job that brings him to the religious community parasiting on the Abbey's reason for being. Tell me what to do. Dress me, put me in a place. Against my will, against my better judgement. I know that she has affairs, imagines the start of something with other men that she meets, this Dora who thinks a lot about not thinking. I should have been able to think for her she drones on like a life support machine. Catherine haunts the edges of her mind that would almost start to live. Unplug. Drones. Murdoch tells me this is so.
Is their innocence to remain apart from their own blood, sweat, tears and dirt? Does the Abbess know them from her cell afar? They think. This means this. That means that. Every effing thing took place off stage. I had a bent head that looked like Nick's like something out of an almost dream. Michael dreamed and he wanted. I had that. I had bare legs. I had Dora's story of the nun who didn't want to be a nun and a drowned bell. An almost idea before it buzzes into whims. I had ideas. They don't live.
May 23, 2020
Iris Murdoch é para mim uma escritora muito particular por ser capaz de produzir uma escrita carregada de erudição e ao mesmo tempo imensamente acessível. Apresenta enorme densidade em elaboradas construções frásicas que funcionam como belos descritivos de ação e pensamento que nunca cansam. Por outro lado, consegue fazer tudo isso mantendo um fio de enredo imensamente intenso, com um sucedâneo de eventos que captam o nosso interesse e nos levam a questionar sobre o que vai acontecer a seguir, enquanto nos deliciamos com os interiores de cada personagem.
O “Sino” não está muito distante do “O Mar, o Mar”, temos uma pequena comunidade de pessoas, cada uma com as suas particularidades, mas unidas por um mesmo desejo, encontrar-se, perceber o que podem ainda fazer das suas vidas que os faça sentir melhor consigo próprios e com os outros. Temos espiritualidade pelo meio, com um convento vizinho, mas o centro é mesmo a quinta para onde se retiram na ânsia por, através do afastamento da realidade corriqueira cheia de prazeres e culpas, encontrar a transcendência que lhes permita redimir tudo o que para trás ficou.
O “Sino”, apesar de aqui apelidado de Gabriel (o anjo mensageiro de Deus), acaba por não entregar as mensagens que todos esperam, criando uma conclusão anti-climática, mas ao mesmo tempo realista, porque de acordo com os resultados destes retiros que tantos de nós prezamos e passamos tempos a imaginar que podiam por nós, pelo interior, fazer milagres. Relembre-se “Walden” (1854) de Thoreau, hino ao escape e retiro, que acaba por colocar a nu o quanto tudo não passa de mero luxo inventado pela burguesia, birra em jeito de confronto das regras instituídas para viver em sociedade.
Mas o que me fica desta leitura é muito mais o mundo criado, a densidade humana povoado pelo interior de cada personagem, as suas relações, rejeições, ânsias e medos. Murdoch enreda belissimamente o que tem para contar, e transporta-nos para o universo por si criado, fazendo-nos sentir bem no seu mundo.
Publicado no VI: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
O “Sino” não está muito distante do “O Mar, o Mar”, temos uma pequena comunidade de pessoas, cada uma com as suas particularidades, mas unidas por um mesmo desejo, encontrar-se, perceber o que podem ainda fazer das suas vidas que os faça sentir melhor consigo próprios e com os outros. Temos espiritualidade pelo meio, com um convento vizinho, mas o centro é mesmo a quinta para onde se retiram na ânsia por, através do afastamento da realidade corriqueira cheia de prazeres e culpas, encontrar a transcendência que lhes permita redimir tudo o que para trás ficou.
O “Sino”, apesar de aqui apelidado de Gabriel (o anjo mensageiro de Deus), acaba por não entregar as mensagens que todos esperam, criando uma conclusão anti-climática, mas ao mesmo tempo realista, porque de acordo com os resultados destes retiros que tantos de nós prezamos e passamos tempos a imaginar que podiam por nós, pelo interior, fazer milagres. Relembre-se “Walden” (1854) de Thoreau, hino ao escape e retiro, que acaba por colocar a nu o quanto tudo não passa de mero luxo inventado pela burguesia, birra em jeito de confronto das regras instituídas para viver em sociedade.
Mas o que me fica desta leitura é muito mais o mundo criado, a densidade humana povoado pelo interior de cada personagem, as suas relações, rejeições, ânsias e medos. Murdoch enreda belissimamente o que tem para contar, e transporta-nos para o universo por si criado, fazendo-nos sentir bem no seu mundo.
Publicado no VI: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
April 2, 2018
Another magnificent book written by one of my favourites authors.
4* Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995
5* Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
5* Iris Murdoch: Dream Girl
4* A Severed Head
4* The Sea, the Sea
4* The Black Prince
4* The Bell
TR Under the Net
TR The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
TR A Fairly Honourable Defeat
TR The Nice and the Good
TR The Philosopher's Pupil
TR The Sandcastle
TR The Italian Girl
TR The Good Apprentice
TR The Red and the Green
4* Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995
5* Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
5* Iris Murdoch: Dream Girl
4* A Severed Head
4* The Sea, the Sea
4* The Black Prince
4* The Bell
TR Under the Net
TR The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
TR A Fairly Honourable Defeat
TR The Nice and the Good
TR The Philosopher's Pupil
TR The Sandcastle
TR The Italian Girl
TR The Good Apprentice
TR The Red and the Green
October 4, 2022
Oh gosh, parts are very, very funny! Think of parties, celebrations and gatherings of family and friends and acquaintances that
you
have been to. Aren’t they often hectic and chaotic with individuals carrying on in unrestrained and unpredictable ways?! Emotions flow over. Arguments erupt. Sensible conversations are few and far between. Readers recall their own similar experiences and smile in recognition. Murdoch catches the mood at such gatherings to a T. She makes you laugh! Murdoch’s dialogs are priceless.
I am always amazed at Murdoch's ability to place before readers a whole group of characters all of whom are well drawn! Readers get multiple in-depth character portrayals. There is always a character the reader syncs with.
Murdoch draws an extremely perceptive and nuanced picture of the emotional turmoil that engulfs a homosexual when first discovering their sexual leaning. She writes also of the confusion that arises when one is unsure of one’s sexual preference. She writes of the psychological rather than of societal norms and restrictions. Today we take homosexuality as a given, but it was not so when the book came out in 1958. The book may today be viewed as an amusing time capsule. There is an ease in Murdoch’s depiction and acceptance of whatever a person’s sexual proclivity might be. This I like, and I like Murdoch’s focus on the psychological, on an individual’s philosophical underpinnings.
Another central theme is religion or the looser term spirituality. The story is set at a newly established lay community attached to a closed Benedictine 12th century abbey located in Gloucestershire, England. A new bell is to be installed in the abbey’s bell tower. We learn the strange tale regarding the earlier bell. The religious views of those making up the community are examined.
Themes are analyzed through the characters, each different from the others. Sex, religion, hobbies, quirks, habits, clothing--everything about them is described. We are shown rather than told. The characters come alive. One guy is always polishing his glasses. Now, what kind of man does that? What does this say to you? Another, a youth soon to attend Oxford, throws his favorite word “rebarbative” into every sentence he possibly can. We are given a jealous husband and his erring, naive wife, a journalist lover, a gorgeous but instable woman soon to become a novice at the abbey, her brother with a propensity for drink and some nuns, who luckily can and do swim! The wide range of characters is fun!
This story is both thought provoking and amusing.
The audio version I listened to is read by Miriam Margolyes. Her narration is fantastic. She uses different intonations for each character. She speaks clearly. She impersonates wonderfully a wide cast of characters, for example such diverse figures as a nun, a drunk and a naïve youth. Moreover, she does this without overdramatization! Five stars for the audio narration.
Why not five stars for the book itself. There are parts, for example relevant but detailed mechanical procedures, that drag a bit. On the other hand, the start pulls you in quickly. The further you go, the closer you come to the characters. I also like that Dora gains confidence and matures. The characters are not static. Yep, I like this a lot, and so I give it four stars.
************************
*The Black Prince 4 stars
*A Fairly Honourable Defeat 4 stars
*The Sandcastle 4 stars
*The Bell 4 stars
*The Good Apprentice 3 stars
*The Sea, The Sea 2 stars
*Jackson's Dilemma 2 stars
*The Unicorn wishlist
*The Time of the Angels wishlist
*The Flight from the Enchanter wishlist
*Nuns and Soldiers TBR
*The Italian Girl TBR
*A Severed Head TBR
*An Unofficial Rose TBR
*A Word Child TBR
*Under the Net maybe
*The Message to the Planet maybe
I am always amazed at Murdoch's ability to place before readers a whole group of characters all of whom are well drawn! Readers get multiple in-depth character portrayals. There is always a character the reader syncs with.
Murdoch draws an extremely perceptive and nuanced picture of the emotional turmoil that engulfs a homosexual when first discovering their sexual leaning. She writes also of the confusion that arises when one is unsure of one’s sexual preference. She writes of the psychological rather than of societal norms and restrictions. Today we take homosexuality as a given, but it was not so when the book came out in 1958. The book may today be viewed as an amusing time capsule. There is an ease in Murdoch’s depiction and acceptance of whatever a person’s sexual proclivity might be. This I like, and I like Murdoch’s focus on the psychological, on an individual’s philosophical underpinnings.
Another central theme is religion or the looser term spirituality. The story is set at a newly established lay community attached to a closed Benedictine 12th century abbey located in Gloucestershire, England. A new bell is to be installed in the abbey’s bell tower. We learn the strange tale regarding the earlier bell. The religious views of those making up the community are examined.
Themes are analyzed through the characters, each different from the others. Sex, religion, hobbies, quirks, habits, clothing--everything about them is described. We are shown rather than told. The characters come alive. One guy is always polishing his glasses. Now, what kind of man does that? What does this say to you? Another, a youth soon to attend Oxford, throws his favorite word “rebarbative” into every sentence he possibly can. We are given a jealous husband and his erring, naive wife, a journalist lover, a gorgeous but instable woman soon to become a novice at the abbey, her brother with a propensity for drink and some nuns, who luckily can and do swim! The wide range of characters is fun!
This story is both thought provoking and amusing.
The audio version I listened to is read by Miriam Margolyes. Her narration is fantastic. She uses different intonations for each character. She speaks clearly. She impersonates wonderfully a wide cast of characters, for example such diverse figures as a nun, a drunk and a naïve youth. Moreover, she does this without overdramatization! Five stars for the audio narration.
Why not five stars for the book itself. There are parts, for example relevant but detailed mechanical procedures, that drag a bit. On the other hand, the start pulls you in quickly. The further you go, the closer you come to the characters. I also like that Dora gains confidence and matures. The characters are not static. Yep, I like this a lot, and so I give it four stars.
************************
*The Black Prince 4 stars
*A Fairly Honourable Defeat 4 stars
*The Sandcastle 4 stars
*The Bell 4 stars
*The Good Apprentice 3 stars
*The Sea, The Sea 2 stars
*Jackson's Dilemma 2 stars
*The Unicorn wishlist
*The Time of the Angels wishlist
*The Flight from the Enchanter wishlist
*Nuns and Soldiers TBR
*The Italian Girl TBR
*A Severed Head TBR
*An Unofficial Rose TBR
*A Word Child TBR
*Under the Net maybe
*The Message to the Planet maybe
May 3, 2011
Iris Murdoch's fourth novel shows a strengthening of fictional power while continuing her philosophical inspection of human character. I love the opening lines: "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."
Dora is one of the two main characters and represents the amoral personality. She is a fairly young woman, married to an older man. While living mainly on nerves and feelings, she has a horror of any sort of confinement and is allergic to boredom, but has virtually no concept of right and wrong.
The other is Michael Mead, a failed religious man who struggles with his homosexuality like a character from Graham Greene. Because sodomy is considered a sin in Christianity, Michael's deep desire to be a priest is constantly thwarted by his failure to keep his sexual desires in check.
The setting is Worcestershire, England at Michael's family estate, where he has created a small lay community of Episcopalians who seek retreat from the world as they attempt to deepen and live out their Christian faith. Dora provides the comedy, which is always a flavor in Murdoch's books. Michael brings the anguish. The other characters are there to create the interactions, tensions and plot, but none are flat or feel secondary.
I admired Murdoch's talent in examining such weighty ideas without judgement. If she found any of her characters unworthy, she only made it known with her tongue in her cheek. Also impressive was her range of personalities, both male and female. Besides the flighty Dora are a hardworking mother-hen type, a fairly psychotic young woman who intends to become a nun, and a deeply wise Mother Superior in the nearby convent.
The eponymous bell stands for an ancient portentous legend and an object of desire, while it drives the plot. I was not wild about the long descriptive passages but did not mind the somewhat lengthy expositions on Michael's and Dora's inner lives. For some reason known only to Iris Murdoch, she used the word rebarbative about every thirty pages. A joke?
Finally, it was historically fascinating to compare the mid 20th century views on male homosexuality to those of the early 21st century. Murdoch gives a clear picture of the previous mindset but was undoubtedly ahead of her time.
The more Murdoch I read, the more impressed I am. I saw a comment by some reviewer the other day stating that Murdoch tells the same story over and over. I couldn't disagree more. She has that theme of human personality and interaction, but each novel I have read so far is unique.
Dora is one of the two main characters and represents the amoral personality. She is a fairly young woman, married to an older man. While living mainly on nerves and feelings, she has a horror of any sort of confinement and is allergic to boredom, but has virtually no concept of right and wrong.
The other is Michael Mead, a failed religious man who struggles with his homosexuality like a character from Graham Greene. Because sodomy is considered a sin in Christianity, Michael's deep desire to be a priest is constantly thwarted by his failure to keep his sexual desires in check.
The setting is Worcestershire, England at Michael's family estate, where he has created a small lay community of Episcopalians who seek retreat from the world as they attempt to deepen and live out their Christian faith. Dora provides the comedy, which is always a flavor in Murdoch's books. Michael brings the anguish. The other characters are there to create the interactions, tensions and plot, but none are flat or feel secondary.
I admired Murdoch's talent in examining such weighty ideas without judgement. If she found any of her characters unworthy, she only made it known with her tongue in her cheek. Also impressive was her range of personalities, both male and female. Besides the flighty Dora are a hardworking mother-hen type, a fairly psychotic young woman who intends to become a nun, and a deeply wise Mother Superior in the nearby convent.
The eponymous bell stands for an ancient portentous legend and an object of desire, while it drives the plot. I was not wild about the long descriptive passages but did not mind the somewhat lengthy expositions on Michael's and Dora's inner lives. For some reason known only to Iris Murdoch, she used the word rebarbative about every thirty pages. A joke?
Finally, it was historically fascinating to compare the mid 20th century views on male homosexuality to those of the early 21st century. Murdoch gives a clear picture of the previous mindset but was undoubtedly ahead of her time.
The more Murdoch I read, the more impressed I am. I saw a comment by some reviewer the other day stating that Murdoch tells the same story over and over. I couldn't disagree more. She has that theme of human personality and interaction, but each novel I have read so far is unique.
April 23, 2018
It was reading 'The Angry Years: A Literary Chronicle' by Colin Wilson in February 2018 which inspired me to want to try some Iris Murdoch.
'The Bell' is the first book I have read by Iris Murdoch and I really enjoyed it. My first novel by Iris Murdoch, but most assuredly not my last. The book is both humorous and moving.
Published in 1958, 'The Bell' was Iris Murdoch's fourth novel.
A young, errant wife re-joins Paul, her older, humourless and bullying husband, at Imber Court in Gloucestershire, a semi-religious lay community run by an ill-assorted group of enthusiasts, set up on the periphery of a closed order of nuns. The inhabitants of Imber Court seek a “refuge from modernity”. For all their higher aspirations, many of the characters are variously beset by religious yearning, sexual passion, and unspoken secrets. It’s also a cautionary tale that anyone attracted to escaping the pressures of modern life by escaping to a monastery, or a closed order of nuns, should probably read.
I liked how homosexuality is treated as very matter of fact. I'd guess that was quite unusual for a novel written in 1958. Indeed a person's sexuality seems of no consequence to Iris Murdoch, it's more about the effects of loving someone you're not necessarily allowed to possess.
'The Bell' is original, unpredictable, easy to read, and quietly profound. Love, goodness, and freedom seem to be the main themes, which are aligned to a compelling plot. There is much to enjoy in this story, and also much to ponder afterwards.
4/5
'The Bell' is the first book I have read by Iris Murdoch and I really enjoyed it. My first novel by Iris Murdoch, but most assuredly not my last. The book is both humorous and moving.
Published in 1958, 'The Bell' was Iris Murdoch's fourth novel.
A young, errant wife re-joins Paul, her older, humourless and bullying husband, at Imber Court in Gloucestershire, a semi-religious lay community run by an ill-assorted group of enthusiasts, set up on the periphery of a closed order of nuns. The inhabitants of Imber Court seek a “refuge from modernity”. For all their higher aspirations, many of the characters are variously beset by religious yearning, sexual passion, and unspoken secrets. It’s also a cautionary tale that anyone attracted to escaping the pressures of modern life by escaping to a monastery, or a closed order of nuns, should probably read.
I liked how homosexuality is treated as very matter of fact. I'd guess that was quite unusual for a novel written in 1958. Indeed a person's sexuality seems of no consequence to Iris Murdoch, it's more about the effects of loving someone you're not necessarily allowed to possess.
'The Bell' is original, unpredictable, easy to read, and quietly profound. Love, goodness, and freedom seem to be the main themes, which are aligned to a compelling plot. There is much to enjoy in this story, and also much to ponder afterwards.
4/5
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